Maria Grazia Pazienza

Altruism and Gender in the Trust Game

This paper analyses gender differences in the trust game. Our experiment implements the triadic design proposed by Cox (2004) to discriminate between transfers resulting from trust or trustworthiness and transfers resulting from altruistic preferences. We observe that women exhibit a higher degree of altruism than men for both trust and trustworthiness but relatively more for trustworthiness. This result provides an explanation to the experimental finding that women reciprocate more than men.

The Gender Effect in the Laboratory: Experimenter Bias and Altruism

We test in the laboratory the effect of changing the experimenters gender in the trust game. We assume that experimental subjects seek to discover the true purpose of the experiment and this behaviour may produce a bias to confirm experimenters expectations. The gender of the experimenter is a possible source of experimenter bias in a test on gender differences. Our findings show that the presence of a female experimenter influences positively trust and reciprocity. This result supports the hypothesis that women are perceived as less selfish than men.

Municipality Budget Rules and Debt: is the Italian regulation effective?

In this paper we investigate the Italian regulation on local government budget related to the European fiscal rules (the so-called Domestic Stability Pact), the Constitutional golden rule, and the pre-existing ceilings on new borrowing, with the intent to study the overall effect on local debt and investment expenditure. Our focus is on the municipality level of government. We use a dataset encompassing the main budget items of virtually all municipalities for the period 1999-2009 to perform panel estimation of the efficacy of local fiscal rules in terms of debt reduction and to detect possible unintended effects on investment spending. Empirical evidence supports the conclusion that the Italian system suffers from a lack of coordination between budget constraints and borrowing limits. Our main conclusion is that the decentralization process in Italy has not found an adequate solution yet: on the one hand, local administrations are not equipped to deal with the increased financial responsibility and the progressive sophistication of financial markets; on the other hand, central government has been inconsistent in devolving fiscal powers to municipalities while at the same time adopting multi-layered regulations to restrain local fiscal autonomy in order to pursue the overall public finance control.

Firms' energy demand and the role of energy taxes: Elasticities estimation of industrial firms in Italy

In this paper we investigate interfuel substitution in the Italian industrial sector using a micro-dataset and a micro-simulation model for firms. According to our estimates there are significant differences between small and large firms. Energy demand of main energy products is not very responsive to relative price changes in the case of firms under 250 workers, whereas higher (negative) own elasticities have been estimated for larger firms, suggesting that price signals are most effective in the latter case. Most of the cross-price elasticities have positive signs, confirming that there is room for a change in energy product mix, which may also be stimulated by a careful excise tax rate design.

Public Policies and the Energy Mix in Italy: Where Do We Stand?

Given the almost complete energy dependency and the consequently high sensitiveness to energy security in Italy, energy efficiency and a significant renewable share in the national energy mix are key goals of energy policy. Although the energy intensity of the Italian economy is among the lowest in western countries, there is room for further improvements pursuing economic growth without increasing the energy use (decoupling). Indeed the high Italian energy efficiency has been stimulated by import dependence and relatively high energy prices, because the economic system proved to be very reactive to selective price incentives towards energy products. Notwithstanding these premises, the general coherence and efficacy of the current framework—a bundle of excise taxes, direct subsidies, feed-in tariffs and tax expenditure together with the launch of an auction-based ETS phase—is highly questionable. Therefore, a progressive evolution of support mechanisms for renewable and energy efficiency to a more cost-effective and market-based system is strongly encouraged. This chapter outlines the current complex incentive system, highlighting incoherencies and successes, and discusses a proposal for a general reform that includes, in accordance with the European Commission proposal, a carbon taxation.

Family taxation and labour market participation incentives in Italy

The potential implications of using the family as opposed to the individual as the unit of taxation are not clear. This applies both to work incentives and distributional outcomes. In this paper we evaluate the effects of a hypothetical reform of Italian income taxation both on labour supply incentives and on redistribution of income between families with different composition and income levels. In particular, we analyze the potential effects of a shift from the current system of individual taxation to a system of family taxation similar to the French family-splitting approach by implementing a tax-benefit model. Based on data from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth, our simulations show a reduction in the degree of progressivity and a disincentive for the labour supply of additional earners within the family.

Heuristics and Biases in Travel Mode Choice

. This study applies experimental methods to analyze travel mode choice. Two different scenarios are considered. In the first scenario, subjects have to decide whether to commute by car or by metro. Metro costs are fixed, while car costs are uncertain and determined by the joint effect of casual events and traffic congestion. In the second scenario, subjects have to decide whether to travel by car or by bus, both modes in which costs are determined by the combination of chance and congestion. Subjects receive feedback information on the actual travel times of both modes. We find that individuals exhibit a marked preference for cars, are inclined to confirm their first choice and demonstrate travel mode stickiness. We conclude that travel mode choice is subject to heuristics and biases that lead to robust deviations from rational choice.

La riforma italiana della tassazione delle imprese e i suoi effetti sulle decisioni di investimento

The Italian Budget Law for the year 2008 introduces a business tax reform, which is inspired to an analogous reform established in Germany in the same year, with the aim of making the corporate taxation system more attractive for capital flows and capable of enhancing firms’ investment activities. The paper focuses on the latter issue and addresses the analysis of the potential effects of the diverse measures adopted with the reform on the dynamics of corporate investments. The essay is organised as follows. In the first section a review of the innovations introduced with the reform is provided; the second paragraph discusses the major elements of the reform’s rationale; in the third section we analyse the effects of the main novelties through a simulation based on firm level data derived by the last two waves of the Capitalia Survey on manufacturing companies covering the period 1998-2003. Finally, in order to further analyse the potential impact of the reform on firms’ decisions, paragraph four presents the results of econometric estimates of the functions of financial debts and corporate investments, which take into account the effects of proper fiscal variables.

Accise energetiche e competitività nelle imprese : un'applicazione sull'esperimento della carbon tax.

An international debate on which economic instrument should be used to reduce pollutant emissions has begun since the nineties when the awareness of climatic risks aroused and first attempts to introduce a European carbon tax were made. Although this project failed, several national programmes of carbon/energy taxes have been developed with a common concern for industrial competitiveness of energy and/or carbon-intensive firms. Therefore, double dividend schemes have been applied to reduce existing distorsive taxes while introducing a higher burden on energy products. This paper reviews the most important European case studies and analyses the effects of the introduction of a carbon tax in Italy on energy expenditure and economic profitability of Italian manufacturing enterprises. This tax has been introduced in 1998 and should have progressively increased up to the final tax rates in 2005. However, this process halted in the year 2000 as the world energy prices increased and the ultimate rates have never been applied. Nonetheless, our analysis offers relevant insights both because energy excises are a major instrument in environmental policy and because industrial activities affected by energy taxes will also be affected by the tradable permits scheme recently adopted by the European Union. The study is performed with a microsimulation model to simulate changes in energy excises and the associated reduction of social contributions to achieve the double dividend. Existing empirical analyses have usually been carried out at aggregate or sectoral level, but the effects on costs both of carbon tax and of compensative measures differ at the firm level, thus it is significant to study the impact on economic profitability on individual units of analysis. The data show that energy expenditure as a component of intermediate costs varies by economic activity as well as the energy mix used in the production process, thus suggesting possible competitiveness problems for some firms as taxation is linked to the carbon content of each energy source. A further element is the sectoral and dimensional variability of prices of some energy products which introduces an additional information to evaluate the impact of rising international energy quotations. The empirical results show a large sectoral and dimensional differentiation of economic effects although the estimated impact on competitiveness is negligible for most sectors. The difference is due to the energy intensity of production and to the energy mix for each process as well as to the quantity of labour employed. In general, the tax burden in the year 2000 has produced fiscal savings compared to the previous tax rules, as the reduction of social contributions has been higher than the cost due to the carbon tax. However, some exceptions occur: economic activities where heavily-taxed products are used such as coal and coke are not fully compensated by the social contribution cut: this is the case of metal products and the production of non metallic mineral products. Moreover, small and medium enterprises benefited more than large industrial firms. As the EU tradable permits scheme will fully come into force and a policy mix of excises and permits on energy products will deploy its effects on the same group of energy-intensive firms, this set of fiscal environmental rules is likely to produce dissimilar effects by economic sectors and by firm size which are worth investigating.

Enhancing European Energy and Climate Security: Eastern Strategic Partners, Unconventional Sources and Public Policies

Energy security has become a heavily discussed topic due to rising energy demand worldwide, increasing import dependence in many European countries, geopolitical tensions and conflicts and the need for a regulatory and policy response. The papers collected in this volume aim at analyzing how energy security in Europe influences international relations and environmental issues with a multidisciplinary perspective, corresponding to the book three sections: international relations, focusing on Eastern EU partners; energy economics, highlighting the current unconventional hydrocarbons revolution and its impact on EU energy and climate strategies; public policy perspective, with the analysis of EU policies and two case studies. The issues considered in the volume represent a selection of hot topics in the debate that are framed together by this introductory chapter where the editors give an overview of the research themes, outline the structure of the book and summarize the contents of the individual chapters.