Fabio Pisani

Financial Education on Secondary School Students: The Randomized Experiment Revisited

We analyze the effects of financial education on a large sample of secondary school students with a randomized experiment performed in the Center (Rome) and North (Milan and Genova) of Italy. Our main findings document that the course increases significantly financial literacy at both student and class level but the effect is different in different urban environments. More specifically, we document that the overall (questionnaire plus course) learning effect is significantly higher in the North than in Rome. We finally observe that high grades at final middle school exams, willingness to attend Economics at University and household borrowing status are three factors which significantly and positively affect financial education.

Education and health in Europe

ABSTRACT The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs, and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years, life styles, health outputs and functionalities. We however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the United States, namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer. Our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in IV estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours’ cultural norms.

Education, Health and Subjective Wellbeing in Europe

The productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health: the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer. We find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of Europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years, life styles, health outputs and functionalities. We however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the US, namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer. Our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in IV estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours’ cultural norms.

Family Money, Relational Life and (Class) Relative Wealth: An Empirical Analysis on Life Satisfaction of Secondary School Students

We investigate factors affecting happiness on a sample of Italian secondary school students. We find that money matters since family’s house ownership, mortgages and (class) relative wealth significantly affect life satisfaction. Other crucial factors are geographical residence (those living in Milan are significantly less happy), mother’s occupation, trust on family and friendships. Even though we cannot rule out inverse causality and other forms of endogeneity, the characteristics of many of the significant regressors such as family wealth, parental job and geographical residence (not under the decisional power of the student) suggest a direct causality nexus for these factors.

Does Fair Trade Help to Avoid Poverty Traps? The Effect of Fair Trade on Producers' Income and Schooling Decisions

We evaluate the impact of fair trade (FT) affiliation on a sample of (treatment and control) producers from two different fair trade projects in a poorer and a relatively better off area of Peru. In both projects, we find that producers income is significantly associated with years of affiliation after controlling for spillovers/externalities. Estimates on the determinants of schooling decisions and education gap on backcast panel data are not at odds with the luxury axiom hypothesis, showing that the impact of affiliation years on the dependent variable is stronger in the project with relatively better-off producers. This result is also consistent with the relatively higher returns on (parental) education estimated in the same project.