Giam Pietro Cipriani

Euro-illusion: a natural experiment

We collect and analyse data on church collections to assess whether the introduction of Euro notes and coins had real effects on giving. Data for Italy suggests that money is not completely neutral while Irish data suggests a lower degree of money illusion. A smaller data set from continental Europe suggests different sorts of money illusion.

Productivity or Discrimination? - Beauty and the Exams

Do good looks make people more productive? An impact of looks on earnings has been found in the empirical literature: plain people earn less than average-looking people who earn less than the good-looking. However, an important question remains unanswered: is the impact of beauty due to pure discrimination or productivity? We provide evidence against the hypothesis of Becker-type discrimination stemming from tastes and in favor of productivity-related discrimination.

PAYG pensions and human capital accumulation: some unpleasant arithmetic

A large literature has studied the effects of PAYG systems on fertility, human capital and growth. We argue that the social security system may also interact with longevity when the latter is endogenously determined. We show that in such an environment, in a dynamically efficient economy PAYG pensions must be sufficiently low in order to ensure positive economic growth. Moreover, a transition to a funded social security system will promote growth, and can thereby take place by fully compensating the losers.

AGING, RETIREMENT, AND PAY-AS-YOU-GO PENSIONS

In this paper we consider the effects of population aging on a pay-as-you-go financed defined contributions pension scheme. We show that when retirement decisions are endogenous, aging increases the retirement age and the steady state level of capital. The effect on pension payouts is in general ambiguous, except for the solution of full retirement, when this effect is unambiguously negative.

Gender difference in willingness to guess after a failure

Abstract A considerable literature in economics and psychology observes substantial gender differences in risk aversion, confidence, and responses to high pressure. In the educational measurement literature, it has been argued that these differences could disadvantage female students when taking multiple-choice tests, especially if there is a penalty for wrong answers. Using a dataset of multiple-choice exams, the author investigates this issue by analyzing the number of unanswered questions. Since most individuals take this exam repeatedly, differences after a failure also can be observed. The results in this article show that there are significant differences between men and women: in the second and third attempts women omit more questions than men. However, this is also the case in the first attempt after excluding the best students.

Endogenous fertility, international migration and growth

An endogenous growth model with heterogeneous agents and endogenous rates of fertility is developed to study the relationships between population growth, human capital, migration and economic development. A variety of patterns of migration, from the migration of the unskilled to the brain drain is considered, where the decision to migrate reflects the agents’ optimising behaviour. The analysis yields implications which accord with the empirical evidence on the relationships between demography and development. Macroeconomic policy can foster growth by influencing labour mobility through taxation and the provision of public goods such as social infrastructure, sanitation, environmental control and medical research that affect locational preferences and child quality.