In March 2020 the Collegio launched an internal call for proposal that focused on the effects of the Covid-19 crisis on the economy and society at large. The call was very successful and the following projects have been funded:

Krzysztof Krakowski

Informal Policing, Return Migration, and Covid-19 Contagion

There is little sound empirical evidence of the effectiveness of within-community, informal policing in containing the Covid-19 contagion as well as on the role and impact of return migrations on the spread of Covid-19 around Europe. The project aims to fill this gap by providing empirical evidence drawn from data on Kosovo (which has experienced a recent massive wave of return migrations from the EU as a consequence of the pandemic) and examining correlations between the number of contagions and measures of community policing and return migrations.

Pietro Garibaldi and Espen R. Moen

SIER Models Meet Pissarides

This paper contributes to the mathematical theory of epidemics by developing a new model to describe the spread of Covid 19, which combines the epidemiological SIER model with the search and matching models developed by Pissarides, thus including behavioural responses in the analysis. The model will allow to study the dynamics of the disease, using epidemiological data for Northern Italy.

Daniela Del Boca, Noemi Oggero, Paola Profeta e Maria Cristina Rossi

Women’s Labor Market Work, Housework, and Savings before and after COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown that has been implemented in many countries have created a stressful environment for Italian families - with additional strain particularly for women - that is likely to cause changes in behavior. Using survey data collected in April 2020, the study will investigate how the pandemic has affected the family environment, in particular as far as the use of time of parents in and outside the household is concerned.

Ugo Mattei

COVID-19 from a comparative law and economics standpoint

This comparative study will produce a series of reports on how the coronavirus is approached legally in different jurisdictions; it will focus primarily on: (1) what kind of democratic procedure is involved; (2) what is the relationship between competences among different levels of government involved, and (3) how long the measures are intended to last; (4) were any monetary/fiscal measures involved and how are they distributed. The study will involve a collaboration between young and senior scholars in different fields and jurisdictions.

Maria Laura Di Tommaso e Caterina Muratori

Does the anti-Covid lockdown policy leave women alone in situations of increased violence? A gender-based policy evaluation

The project will analyze whether the Covid-19 crisis and the lockdown measures in Italy have caused a sudden increase in the level of violence within households, as a result of greater individual stress and constant proximity of victims and assaulters; it will also quantify the size of the decrease in social support due to lockdown policies. The study will exploit data on users who turn to 1522 (anti-violence and stalking number) recorded by the 1522 helpline operators and collected by Istat, and the Istat survey on anti-violence Centers begun in January 2020.

Davide Morisi, Guillaume Kon Kam King e Max Schaub

Incumbency voting and the threat of Covid-19: the case of France

The project will analyse how the external threat posed by Covid-19 has affected voting behaviour in both the first and second round of municipality elections that were held in France during the pandemic. The aim is to investigate whether voters in emergency situations tend to reward incumbent candidates and whether they prefer to support right-wing candidates.

Ainoa Aparicio Fenoll e Ignacio Monzón

Coronavirus: an Early Warning System for its Socieconomic Impacts

The project intends to use Google Trends data for Italy and Spain to construct proxies for key socioeconomic variables, thus helping to shed light on some of the – still largely unmeasured – socioeconomic effects of the Covid-19 crisis (health, education, time use, poverty, demographic phenomena). The result will be useful to understand how the crisis has changed Italian and Spanish societies, as well as to formulate policy predictions.

Francesco Devicienti

Safer Global and Local Value Chains in the Coronavirus Era: Determinants and Effects for workers and Firms

The research aims at empirically investigating firms' supply chains - which have been largely affected by the Covid-19 crisis - from various angles. The objective is to reconstruct firm-level chains, and study how these are structured at the local, national and international level, understanding the determinants of specific chain configurations. The study will also analyse the consequences for firms and workers of participating in different configurations of supply chains.

Marco Tosi e Krzysztof Krakowski

The impact of Covid-19 on Mental Health: An analysis of depression-related emotions of Twitter users

The spread of the Covid-19 contagion has raised concerns about implications on people’s mental health. The study will identify mental health outcomes related to the Covid-19 by analysing Twitter emotional expressions in the context of national specific pandemic situations; it will also investigate how depression-related emotions have changed during the crisis in three countries: Italy, Poland and Japan.

Aron Szekely

Does Disease Threat Shape the Social Norms of Cultures? A Cross-Country Study

This project aims to identify the causal effect of Covid-19 on the tightness-looseness of social norms in different countries, the resilience of these changes, and its consequences for society. The study is based on a recent multi-country survey that provides information on social norms before and after the Covid -19 outbreak. Using a difference-in-difference analysis, it will test whether any changes occurred, whether these are stable or not and some possible effects they produce on society.

Francesco Figari, Carlo Fiorio, Roberto Quaranta e Stefano Sacchi

Welfare resilience at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and Europe: impact on occupation, public finance and household incomes

The project aims to analyse the extent to which European welfare systems, and the Italian one in particular, provide monetary compensation for those who lost their earnings due to the lockdown imposed by the governments in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a microsimulation approach, It will provide evidence on the differing degrees of relative and absolute resilience of the household incomes of the individuals affected by the lockdown.

Francesco Carbonero, Aldo Geuna e Sergio Schicchitano

Digitization of occupations in the COVID19 Pandemic

The literature on automation is flourishing and reveals that the labour market consequences of the current technological wave are heterogeneous. Much of the research has focused on the disruptive effects of automation on employment. Few have been devoted to the transformative nature of automation. This study  will look at the occupational consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) and we assess whether there are possible benefits of using automation to face the current COVID-19 epidemics in Italy.

Elisa Luciano e Jean-Charles Rochet

The impact of Covid-19 on the insurance industry

Like the rest of the economy, the insurance industry is going to be severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, which will have complex effects including huge financial losses on the companies' portfolios of stocks and corporate bonds and downward revisions in expectations of future profits. By using a dynamic model of the insurance industry, the project aims at disentangling these multifaceted effects. The study will result in a policy paper to be submitted to peer reviewed journals.

Diego Gambetta e Davide Morisi

Blaming the blameless? Covid-19 and attitudes towards migrants in Italy

The study will investigate how the experience of Covid-19 affected the perception of migrants in Italy, using an original survey experiment conducted with a representative sample of Italian voters. The project aims to understand whether the pandemic helped raise a sense of empathy towards the most vulnerable members of the society, in addition to general trust in unknown others.

Filippo Barbera, Giuliano Bobba, Camilla Borgna, Moreno Mancosu, Antonella Seddone e Federico Vegetti

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic crisis on social and institutional trust

The project, a joint collaboration with the Department of Cultures, Politics, and Society of the University of Turin, has two goals. First, it investigates the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on institutional and social trust. We will also examine behaviors that are indirectly affected by trust, such as compliance with confinement regulations. Second, the project tackles the information dimension by assessing trust in science, news consumption, and beliefs in conspiracy theories. To address these questions, we will design an original survey that will be linked to pre-existing SWG polls on institutional and social trust. The survey will be administered to a representative sample of the Italian population (2,000 cases), with an oversampling of Piedmont (800 cases).

Matthijs Breugem, Raffaele Corvino, Roberto Marfè, and Lorenzo Schoenleber

Pandemic Tail Risk

The study contributes to the literature on option implied information by investigating to what extent stock market prices reflected the risk of the Covid-19 pandemic well before their declines in late February, and during the major sell-offs in March. It will focus in particular on the ability of the financial market to price tail risk (i.e., risk of extreme events) related to the Covid-19 outbreak, studying options prices of pandemic-sensitive firms before and during the February 2020 stock market crash.

Matthijs Breugem, Stefano Colonnello, Roberto Marfè, Lorenzo Schoenleber

COVID-19 and Market-Based Expected Growth. An Investigation of the German and Italian Outlooks

The project will investigate the expectations of the economic outlook in Germany and Italy by focusing on the cross-section of equity markets, in order to infer about the dynamics of growth expectations during the spread of COVID-19, taking advantage of the recent advances of asset pricing theory concerning the term structure of equity.

Pierluigi Conzo, Arnstein Aassve, Letizia Mencarini, Nicolò Cavalli and Chen Peng

Pandemics and social cohesion: Assessing and monitoring trust at the time of COVID-19

Social and institutional trust is a key variable to help understanding behavioural change at the population level. This empirical study will provide novel and robust empirical evidence on the (dynamic) relationship between trust and the pandemic, by monitoring, through an ad hoc panel survey, social and institutional trust in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study will also explore potential changes in institutional trust and in the identification of targets to blame for the pandemic in response to most popular and debated political speeches held during the health emergency.

Camilla Borgna, Francesco Costamagna, Elena Corcione e Virginia Passalaqua

Covid-19 as an inequality challenge: Testing the EU response

The 2009 economic crisis and the related austerities measures exacerbated preexisting inequalities and social exclusion in Europe. Therefore, it is crucial to monitor the impact of the Covid-19 crisis and of the policy measures adopted to counteract it, both under a social and economic perspective. This project will focus on how the EU counter-crisis policies impact on migrants, and it has three main goals: i. Providing an analysis of the EU crisis response and equality instruments, both under legal and socio-political perspectives; ii. Analyzing the socio-economic situation of migrants amid the covid-19 crisis; iii. Assessing the impact of selected EU measures on labor-market participation and poverty, with a focus on possible disproportional effects on non-citizens.

Ylenia Brilli, Chiara Pronzato, Daniela Del Boca e Lucia Schiavon

All at home? The lockdown during the Coronavirus epidemic and family wellbeing

Using data from a survey on Italian families, this project will provide evidence on how the lockdown implemented in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the family environment. The study will identify changes in the use of time of parents and children; describe the family environment during the lockdown and the “parenting” needs of families after the lockdown period; identify the medium-term effects of the lockdown on family behavior and children wellbeing.