Lorenzo Biferale (p)

This paper advocates for a better understanding of cultural consumption habits in urban contexts by exploring the effects played by the spatial distance between consumers and suppliers on individual levels of cultural consumption. The study moves from the intuition of using HFLB data (GPS) to overcome the lack of traditional data on cultural consumption.

Focusing on the case study of Milan, results reveal the emergence of spatial inequalities
both in the distribution of cultural amenities and in individual consumption behaviours. It
shows that proximity with cultural amenities describe individual consumption patterns
through a negative power-law function and that such relation is stronger for individuals
averse to cultural consumption.

Giorgia Casalone, Alessandra Michelangeli Jurgena Myftiu (p)

Abstract

Financial aid, such as grants, loans, and scholarships may help disadvantaged students to enrol and complete higher education. Hence, growing these resources would help to reduce the social inequalities in students’ outcomes related to social background and geographical areas of residence. Aina et al., (2021) point out that the completion of the higher education career path depends not only on a mix of individual, institutional, and economic factors but also on a student’s ability to attend courses, live in different social contexts, and integrate into the academic system as a whole. Yet, the actual literature has so far focused on the evaluation of outreach programmes and measures based on family income levels, without reviewing the award criteria for students’ eligibility (Herbaut & Geven, 2020). In Italy, the “Right to Study” (EDISU) provides three different types of scholarships rely on: family income, student merit, and the home-university distance. Moreover, students eligible for the scholarship are ranked among on-site, commuter, and off-site.
The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we want to assess the effect of conditions for the eligibility of scholarships and relative conditional amount at the distance from the university. Secondly, we investigate the role the scholarship as an efficient tool to reduce the drop-out rate and boost academic performance.
The dataset combines the administrative information on students’ careers provided by the University of Piemonte Orientale with the data collected by EDISU. For a total of 68,000 observations about the exams taken by 30,709 students, the final sample covers six academic years, from 2015/2016 to 2021/2022.
We apply the fuzzy version of the Regression Discontinuity Design (Thistlethwaite and Campbell, 1960; Angrist and Lavy, 1999) to different home-university travel times to determine whether the three categories specified above might efficiently support recipients’ academic careers in terms of lower drop-out rate and better academic outcomes. We argue that the proposed analysis may have national relevance, provided that the amounts of scholarships are related to continuous variables categorised into grouping values.