Working Papers del DiSIA
Gutta cavat lapidem. Survival as the ultimate driver of population age structures
Gustavo De Santis, Giambattista Salinari
Cross sectional life tables implicitly generate stationary populations, with their own age structure. In this paper, we show that these age structures act as a point of reference, or attraction, for current (real) age structures.
Reference age structures change over time, depending on how mortality evolves. While this complicates their connection with real age structures, which must then "aim at a moving target", it does not invalidate the basic principle: age structures change over time keeping close to their corresponding reference counterpart, even if their short-term variations tend to have limited relation with survival conditions. The share of individuals who can be properly classified by age based on the sole knowledge of recent mortality (i.e., having a life table at hand) is usually higher than 80%, and never below 64% in the very numerous cases examined here.
This finding has a series of implications, discussed in the conclusions of the paper: for instance, on the relative role of fertility and mortality in shaping age structures, on the theoretical meaning and practical use of cross-section life tables, and on the notion and measure of demographic dividend.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
Measuring Sustainability Consciousness in Italy
Silvia Bacci, Bruno Bertaccini, Ester Macrì, Anna Pettini
The most common notion sees sustainability as an ideal and necessary state in which society, the environment and the economy can thrive without harming each other in the present, the future and the global space. In this paper, using data from a sample of respondents, we validate the Italian version of the Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire developed by a Swedish research group (Gericke et al., 2019), which aims to measure sustainability consciousness as an individual experience and awareness of sustainability. The validation process relies on the Hierarchical Confirmatory Factor Analysis model of estimation and includes both the long and short forms of the questionnaire proposed in the original study. Specifically, we propose two alternative approaches to validating the short form, one based on the same subset of items as the original proposal, and another based on a data-driven strategy, resulting in a different subset of items. After validation at the national level, the Sustainability Consciousness Questionnaire represents a useful tool for researchers and policymakers to assess how aware and responsible a national or local population is regarding such an important and urgent global goal.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
The changing socioeconomic gradient in the dissolution of marriage and cohabitation: Evidence from a latecomer of the Second Demographic Transition
Elena Bastianelli, Raffaele Guetto, Daniele Vignoli
The existing literature on the (changing) socioeconomic gradient of divorce is not without shortcomings. First, virtually all studies have operationalized individuals’ socioeconomic status through education, downplaying that class differences may be equally (or even more) important. While education may proxy cultural and cognitive skills, social class could more accurately capture individuals’ economic means. Second, most studies have only focused on married couples, despite non-marital cohabitation having become commonplace. Third, the majority of studies have exclusively focused on women. This study addresses such oversights by analyzing the educational and social class gradients of marriage and cohabitation in Italy—a country widely-known as a latecomer of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) and long characterized by a limited diffusion of union dissolution. We adopted non-proportional hazard models to estimate survival curves and probabilities of union dissolution for married and cohabiting women and men, stratifying by education, social class, and cohort. We found that education and social class play an important and independent role as antecedents of union dissolution in Italy. Our results suggest a vanishing, among women, and a reversal from positive to negative, among men, of the educational and social class gradients of marital dissolution across cohorts. We found no clear socioeconomic gradient in the dissolution of cohabiting unions, neither in terms of education nor social class. However, cohabiting men who are not employed were found to face a much higher risk of union dissolution.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
The last bastion is falling: Survey evidence of the new demographic reality in Italy
Arnstein Aassve, Letizia Mencarini, Elena Pirani, Daniele Vignoli
The study makes use of the 2016 Household Multipurpose Survey of Family, Social Subjects, and Life Cycle (FSS) to demonstrate that family-related behaviour is now rapidly changing in Italy. The country is often taken as a stronghold of traditionalism. We, instead, highlight recent and substantial changes in cohabitation, dissolution and non-marital fertility in the country. In doing so, we carefully assess the predictions made by the Second Demographic Transition (SDT), and show that trends in Italy are monotonically moving in the direction of the SDT. There are, though, important differences across educational groups and regions. Demographic behaviour is also changing in the South of Italy in much the same way, but not at the same speed as in the rest of the country.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
Mortality evolution in Italy: whatever happened to regional convergence?
Gianni Carboni, Giambattista Salinari, Gustavo De Santis, Federico Benassi
In several European countries, life expectancy has progressed little in the past two decades. In this paper, focused on Italy, we investigate whether “austerity” and health regionalization may have contributed to this outcome. We show that the succession of reforms to the Italian health system introduced since the 1990s closely corresponds to discontinuities in the evolution of regional life expectancies, halting or reversing their previous trend towards convergence. This holds for both sigma and beta convergence and for both genders, albeit earlier for females.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
The Causal Impact of Temporary Employment on First Births in Italy: An Update
Raffaele Guetto, Valentina Tocchioni, Daniele Vignoli
Rising economic uncertainty is widely considered in the literature as one of the driving forces behind the postponement of childbearing and the reduction in fertility rates in contemporary Europe, especially following the Great Recession. Understanding whether employment instability causally and negatively impacts fertility decisions is of fundamental importance to providing clear recommendations to policymakers. To the best of our knowledge, the only study applying a counterfactual approach to the study of the causal impact of temporary employment for the transition to parenthood is a recent article by Vignoli, Tocchioni, and Mattei (2020). The present study replicates such a paper utilizing more recent data for Italy (2016, instead of 2009), thus covering a period encompassing the time of the Great Recession. We adopt the potential outcome approach to causal inference so as to quantify the net effect of having a first job with a temporary vs. permanent contract on the propensity to have a first child within the first five years of employment. Our findings confirm a clear-cut causal effect of temporary employment on first birth postponement. Even among men, we found negative causal effects of a first experience of temporary work, although less intense. These results largely overlap with those obtained by Vignoli and colleagues (2020), demonstrating how precarious work has by now become a structural factor discouraging the transition to parenthood among young Italians.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
The impact of parental separation on the pattern of transition to adulthood in Italy
Marcantonio Caltabiano, Silvia Meggiolaro, Valentina Tocchioni
Many studies investigate the effects of parental separation on children, concentrating on short-term adjustment or long-term effects. Nevertheless, most of them usually consider each outcome separately, thus missing to look at the interdependencies among the different events. This paper focuses on the effects of parental separation on the events marking the transition to adulthood (from the end of education to parenthood) in a comprehensive way concentrating on a country, Italy, characterized by many peculiarities. Our aim is to verify whether young adults whose parents separated during childhood or youth show alternative pathways in comparison with those living with both parents, considering also whether the age at parental separation plays a role in differentiating these trajectories. Using data from two cross-sectional rounds of the survey ‘Families and Social Subjects’ conducted in 2009 and 2016, we applied the Sequence Analysis Multistate Model procedure. Results suggest that children of non-intact families present particular trajectories especially for the formation of their own household, where a strong cultural effect seems to be at play (e.g., favoring cohabitation). Children’s age at parental separation seems to differentiate more the pattern towards young adults’ economic independence than of formation of their own household.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
Can Policy Reforms Enhance Fertility? An Ex-Ante Evaluation through Factorial Survey Experiments
Raffaele Guetto, Giammarco Alderotti, Daniele Vignoli
This paper contributes to the literature on the family policies-fertility nexus by assessing the potential role of parental leaves, childcare services, and child benefits on fertility through the use of factorial survey experiments (FSE). We focus on Italy, a country whose lowest-low fertility is often traced back to its familistic and sub-protective welfare state. We collected data on 4,022 respondents aged 20-44 and exposed them to several scenarios characterised by different family policy packages. We asked them to ascribe short-term fertility intentions to a fictitious couple under these different policy scenarios, in a sort of ex-ante evaluation of possible policy reforms. Results show that each of the family-friendly policies we envisioned in the experiment positively impacts ascribed fertility intentions. The availability of full-time, public childcare services seems more relevant than higher child benefits, whereas more generous and gender-equal parental leaves are perceived as less relevant. However, results suggest that only a consistent mix of financial benefits, parental leave schemes, and childcare provisions can potentially boost fertility intentions, whereas marginal changes in single policy levers are most likely ineffective. The results of our FSE point out that a couple’s socioeconomic status is perceived as more important than family policies for fertility decisions, as ascribed fertility intentions increase substantially when both partners of the fictitious couple are employed and household income is high. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for policymaking.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
Men and women’s employment status and union (in)stability: does contextual gender equality matter?
Elena Bastianelli, Cristina Solera, Daniele Vignoli
Gender theories agree that the role played by women and men’s employment status in the prediction of union dissolution depends on the level of gender equality in the society. Given its strong regional differences, Italy represents an excellent laboratory to study how variations in gender contexts influence the gendered relationship between employment status and union dissolution. We measured regional gender equality by means of an index comprising equality in three spheres: the labor market, the family, and the welfare context. By applying discrete-time event history models to nationally representative data, we estimated the probability of union dissolution for jobless and employed men and women across regions. Our results showed that, as contextual gender equality increases, differences by employment status diminish, and gender differences in the relationship between employment status and union dissolution virtually disappear – even in a country considered ‘traditional’ in terms of family and gender dynamics.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
Intergenerational Transmission of Home-Leaving Patterns
Elia Moracci, Raffaele Guetto, Daniele Vignoli
Exploiting intergenerationally linked data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we examine the association between the home-leaving ages of parents and those of their daughters and sons. We propose a framework in which intergenerational associations between nest-leaving patterns of successive generations might stem from three channels of transmission, and we rely on detailed information on three generations of individuals to establish the strength of each channel. We find that a 1-year increase in the age at which a parent left home is associated with children leaving the nest approximately 1 month later. We argue that the bulk of this association is due to direct cultural transmission of home-leaving ages stemming from the inheritance of preferences on the optimal timing of life-course events.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
Analisi della qualità dei dati sulla mortalità dei vaccinati contro il Covid-19 rilasciati dal Ministero della Salute a seguito della sentenza n. 12013/2023 del TAR del Lazio
Michela Baccini, Bruno Cheli, Eugenio Florean, Rachele Foschi, Lorenzo Melacarne, Giovanni Trambusti
Per effetto della sentenza n. 12013/2023 del TAR del Lazio, nel mese di agosto 2023 il Ministero della Salute ha dovuto rilasciare un data base di oltre 45 milioni di record contenenti alcune informazioni sugli individui che si sono vaccinati contro il Covid-19 durante il primo anno della campagna vaccinale. L’intento della richiesta di accesso ai dati, fatta dall’Avv. Lorenzo Melacarne del Foro di Milano, era quello di poter analizzare in modo autonomo la mortalità dei soggetti vaccinati e di confrontarla con quella dei non vaccinati, dubitando dell’attendibilità dei risultati di due analisi di confronto tra decessi osservati e attesi pubblicate da AIFA nel 5° e 10° Rapporto sulla Sorveglianza dei vaccini Covid-19. In questo lavoro si analizza la qualità dei suddetti dati rilasciati dal Ministero della Salute, allo scopo di capire se essi siano idonei o meno a valutare in modo attendibile la mortalità nella popolazione vaccinata contro il Covid-19. Dall’analisi svolta emerge una serie di vistose incongruenze che segnalano la probabile presenza di errori nei dati, errori di entità tale da non consentirne l’utilizzo per analisi sostantive della mortalità dei soggetti vaccinati contro il Covid-19. Pertanto, si ritiene necessario che il Ministero della Salute svolga adeguati controlli e/o fornisca chiarimenti in merito alle anomalie da noi riscontrate.
Working Papers del Dipartimento
Ultimo aggiornamento 16 gennaio 2024.