Giulio Grossi, Patrizia Lattarulo, Marco Mariani (p), Alessandra Mattei, Özge Öner

Fabian Wenner

The creation of urban rail transport infrastructure may have general implications on the economic landscape of the peripheral city areas that are served, and may also generate spillovers on neighboring ones. Our motivating application focuses on the causal effects of a tramway line built in Florence (Italy) on the local commercial environment and on the economic vitality of retailers. It considers a time horizon that encompasses both the construction and the later period of operation of the infrastructure. In theory, the neighborhoods where the tramway is built might suffer from harder accessibility and poor attractiveness during construction works, then benefit from improved accessibility and attractiveness later on. This kind of observational setting poses interesting challenges for causal inference. We conduct the analysis at the area level and consider a number of outcomes related to local commercial vitality. On the one hand, interference may exist between areas that have different treatment status but are close to each other, for example because of traffic diversion, whereas it is unlikely to exist between distant areas. On the other hand, depending on how wide the treatment area is defined – e.g., using a fixed-distance buffer around the tramway site – there may be interference within the treatment group itself, as shops in the buffer area that are more distant from the infrastructure could receive positive spillovers from those that are closer to the construction site, and negative ones once the tramway is in operation.

Elena Ragazzi (p), Ugo Finardi, Alessandro Manello, Lisa Sella

Marco Mariani

See extended abstract.
The general objective of the paper is to present the results of an evaluation of the effects produced by the regulatory measures and institutional practices introduced in recent years for the purposes of gender rebalancing in the elective offices.
Many countries have introduced rules to accelerate the rebalancing process. The general feeling is that their effectiveness may vary a lot, because they need to be well designed and effectively implemented to achieve good results. A statistical recognition of gender shares among candidates and elected representatives for all institutions in Italy, in the period 2000-2016shows a growing tendency. Reforms intervene on this slow trend giving further propulsion to the rebalancing process. So the counterfactual approach is fundamental to verify if there has been a significant impact, detangling it from the deadweight effect.
The impact evaluation is limited to the case of municipalities. In the other cases the lack of a credible counterfactual forces us to limit to statistical analysis of observed change.
The paper presents and compares the results of three evaluation approaches: Panel models, natural experiment and RDD.
Panel regressions including individual fixed effects can be applied to isolate the elements that influence the share of elected representatives , so addressing the problem of endogeneity. The approach makes it possible to verify the existence of trends in the presence of women in politics, in place independently of the legislative reform introduced in 2012. At the same time it allows to test the significance of the difference between the shares of women and men before and after the reform, providing a measure of the net impact of the policy.
The second evaluation design exploits the condition of natural experiment that arose in the years immediately after the reform. This condition derives from the fact that, even if the law with the new gender measures came into force for all the municipalities subject to the legislation at the same time, the latter have electoral different dates for the election of the municipal council.
Finally we apply a regression-discontinuity-design, comparing units that are immediately below or immediately above a policy application threshold represented by the size of the municipality in terms of inhabitants. Parties in municipalities smaller than 5.000 people are just asked to present lists with candidates of both genders, while municipalities over the threshold have to apply various mechanisms.
The approaches are compared and discussed.

Sander Ramboer (p), Jo Reynaerts

Elena Ragazzi

We evaluate the effectiveness of regional state aid to firms in eligible areas across Flanders, Belgium. To examine the impact on local employment, we exploit changes in treatment assignment made to comply with EU Guidelines on state aid. We estimate the treatment effect using difference-in-differences on employment data in eligible areas and areas once considered for selection but ultimately not chosen. To account for possibly endogenous selection out of treatment, we augment the analysis with inverse probability weighting based on area characteristics inherent to the area designation methodology. While we find an overall positive effect of treatment in eligible areas, equivalent to a 5\% increase in employment, we show this is mostly temporary and that treatment mainly helped retain employment in declining manufacturing industries. However, some evidence does suggest that a change in the application procedure, halfway through the treatment period, resulted in job creation.

Fabian Wenner (p), Alain Thierstein

Sander Ramboer

see extended abstract