Fabio Fiorillo

Cooperation Among Local Councils for the Provision of Public Goods

In order to provide local public goods, municipalities can cooperate and exploit economiesof scale and scope. We present an analytical model of the costs and benefits of two such forms of cooperation:Consortia and Unions. We find that the efficiency of these two forms of cooperation depends onthe number of participants, the transaction costs, and most importantly the type of local public good. Inparticular, the elasticity of substitution among the services pertaining to a particular public good plays adecisive role. For services with a high elasticity of substitution the Union performs better than the Consortium,and vice versa. This provides a guidance for the decision on which institution provides whatpublic good.

Searching for a Job is a Beauty Contest

The paper deals with the impact of beauty on employability of people, stressing the first stage of the hiring process. In particular, we studied if there exists a preference for attractive candidates and if it does whether it depends on sex, physical features and racial characteristics. We monitored all relevant agencies offering jobs in Italy from August 2011 to September 2012 sending 11008 CVs to 1542 advertised job openings. To do so, we construct fake CVs and we sent the same CV 8 times, changing only name and surname, address, and the photo included. In particular, we sent 4 CVs with photo of an attractive and unattractive man and women, and 4 CVs without photo of an Italian and a foreign men and women to each job opening. Callbacks rates are statistically significant higher for attractive women and men than unattractive ones. Racial discrimination appears to be statistically relevant, but less than discrimination based on the physical features, especially for women.

Standard di spesa e di entrata nella Legge Delega sul federalismo fiscale : un'analisi con un modello CGE.

The Law 42/09 represents an important step towards fiscal federalism in Italy. In particular, the Law places its foundation on the principles of territoriality, fiscal autonomy and fiscal equalization in order to abandon the criterion of historical expenditure in favor of «standard costs». A standard level of services must be provided by the local governments which must finance the expenditures mainly with their own tax revenues. In case the revenues are not adequate to cover the «standard» financial needs, the central government intervenes with equalization transfers. The definition of «standard criteria» therefore represents a crucial phase in the whole reforming process. The amount of central government transfers in fact depends on the flexibility of these criteria. Since the law gives very few indications on how to calculate the «standard costs/revenues», in this work we propose some alternative evaluations of these and assess the impact that different approaches can have on the central and local budgets using a CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) model based on a bi-regional SAM (Social Accounting Matrix) for Italy for 2003.