Alberto Hidalgo (p), Federico Curci

Lorenzo Rossi

This study examines the economic impacts of tall building construction in the United States between 2000 and 2017. Using a novel zip-code-level dataset that combines building height data, establishment counts, employment, and housing values, we explore how tall buildings shape local economies. To address endogeneity, we use an instrumental variable strategy leveraging demand and supply factors to isolate the impact of tall buildings on urban economies. Our findings show that tall buildings significantly boost establishments and employment, particularly in business-oriented sectors like offices and hotels. They also foster knowledge-intensive activities, reduce space-intensive sectors such as manufacturing, and lead to housing appreciation. Furthermore, these benefits are concentrated near tall buildings and diminish with distance. Overall, our findings highlight how vertical urban growth fosters economic development and reshapes cities’ industrial and spatial organization.

Marco Di Cataldo, Lorenzo Rossi (p)

Elena Ragazzi

Does losing access to European funding lower European sentiment? After the 2004 enlargement, ten countries joined the European Union, reshaping the map of cohesion policy beneficiaries. As EU citizens saw funding shift towards the new member states, they may have perceived it as a loss, potentially leading to a decline in support for the EU. Using a Syntethic Difference-in-Differences methodology, we exploit changes in the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) convergence objective across different programming periods, to study how losing the convergence objective status impact on European sentiment. The preliminary results suggest that losing funds implies a reduction in support towards the EU, especially considering the 2000-2006 Programming Period. Using the full sample and an event study estimation strategy, we show that European sentiment is decreasing after losing convergence status, and this decrease looks greater as time goes, but more investigation is required to ensure the robustness of these findings. The relevance of this paper would be to understand if the EU enlargement itself, through the reshaping of Cohesion Policy beneficiaries, may have been one of the factors behind rising Euroscepticism. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate how losing EU funding impacts public sentiment toward the EU.

Elena Ragazzi (p), Eva Dettmann, Lisa Sella

Alberto Hidalgo

The National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL) provides incentives to firms to invest in occupational safety and health in Italy. Incentives are devoted primarily to small and micro firms in high-risk sectors and are granted for various measures to increase safety and health at work. During the so-called click day, eligible firms can apply for this program. After a first verification, the firms are selected according to the principle “first come – first serve”.
We exploit this design to estimate the effect of the funding of risk management systems (RMS) on the incidence of accidents and severe accidents. The policy design causes several problems of non-compliance to treatment decision, such as a comparably large number of firms that drop out on the way from being selected to the actual funding, or firms that invest with own funds when not selected. For this we use different administrative data sets of INAIL (ISI funding data, information on occupational accidents, and firm data) and enhance the data base by ORBIS balance sheet data as well as ACCREDIA certification information of RMS. The resulting rich database enables us to describe the funded and non-funded firms and to estimate the effect of funding.
The study builds on previous research (Sella, Ragazzi, Radin 2023; Sella, Ragazzi, Dettmann 2023), in which some effects were found, but the results were not robust. In this paper we apply a non-parametric IV model to control for the dropouts.