Elena Renzullo (p), Marco Di Cataldo, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

Cecilia Castaldo

The quality of institutions is regarded as a fundamental factor for the success of the European Cohesion Policy. This work studies whether the control and the collusion of local politicians with criminals and pressure groups, one crucial aspect of the quality of government, is detrimental to the effective implementation of the EU Cohesion Policy. Exploiting southern Italy as a testing ground, this work analyses if mafia infiltrations in Italian municipal government – identified by the Italian Law 164/1991 - alters the allocation of EU investments toward thematics in line with the interest of criminal organizations harming the common interest.

Lisa Sella (p), Elena Ragazzi, Arianna Radin

Elena Renzullo

No one, neither in politics nor in sciences dares to argument against the necessity to fight to reduce the impact of working conditions on worker’s health. Perhaps such a wide consensus on the importance of this goal is one explanation for the general lack of evaluation studies (The European Agency for Health and Safety at Work 2013) on occupational safety and health policies (OSH). Nevertheless, acquiring more information on the effectiveness of the different tools available for the policy maker could help to afford those situations that are refractory to change and move towards a more effective policy mix. At present this last is heavily unbalanced, with the greatest majority of interventions concentrated in regulation and related enforcement mechanisms (inspections and sanctions).
The Italian case offers us an interesting case study, because in 2008, a system of economic incentives has been introduced, providing grants to SMEs that invest in the OSH field. This represents a sort of revolution, because it leverages the corporate social responsibility towards their workers. This experimental policy, called the “ISI calls” (bandi ISI) is the most long lasting (12 years), richest in terms of money granted (2 billion euros) and widest in terms of firms involved OHS policy based on incentives. Despite this, at the policy level the balance is still leaning in favor of sticks rather than carrots.
Up to now, the evaluation analyses performed by Inail on the ISI calls mainly concerned implementation processes and performance monitoring, reporting, and accounting. Recently, the need for an ex-post evaluation of the impacts emerged. Therefore, Inail is funding a research project aimed at identifying appropriate models to assess the impact of ISI incentives and to highlight their strengths and criticalities as an economic support to SMEs. The ISI call, implemented through the mechanisms of the click-day, represent a case of natural experiment, nevertheless, many evaluation challenges (previously discussed in Colagiacomo et al. 2018) are present for this type of policies, in which the literature is practically non-existent.
In this paper we will present results of the impact evaluation of the ISI calls aimed at funding the implementation of “Risk Management Systems”. The analyses are based on administrative data on participating firms. A profiling of the several subgroups of firms (selected or non-admitted, funded or not funded) will be provided. Moreover, we will integrate this analysis with data on the safety profile of the firms.

Cecilia Castaldo (p), Daniele Curzi, Alessandro Olper

Lisa Sella

We investigate the impact of Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) on farms' costs, labour and income growth rates at the EU level and country-group level. Using a difference-in-difference exact matching design, we show that the impact of the AES measure on farmers participating in the program led to a significant increase in the growth rate of each economic outcome analysed. Despite the rise in production and raw material costs and labour inputs needed, as a result of more onerous sustainability criteria required by AES measure, farms participating in the program report an increase in income growth rate compared to non-participants at the EU and country levels. The effects appear to be unevenly distributed for the other outcomes: costs are higher and more significant in Western countries, while the major effects on labour are observed mainly in Southern and Eastern ones. Overall, our results explain the role of the current CAP change and future reforms of the direct payment policy targeting environmental goals.