Research

This paper studies the cost-effectiveness of payroll taxes for stimulating labor demand. It uses rich administrative data to study the effects of an Italian reform that raised social security contributions for apprenticeship contracts but granted a substantial discount for firms with 9 employees or less. The discount does not increase demand for apprenticeship contracts. Instead, it subsidizes inframarginal hiring. This reform is not cost-effective. Point estimates imply that each million euros of foregone social security contributions supports the employment of 347 apprentices for one month and no permanent contracts (these estimates are not statistically different from zero).

This paper studies the long-run economic impact of dismissing city councils infiltrated by organized crime. Applying a matched difference-in-differences design to the universe of Italian social security records, we find that city council dismissals (CCDs) increase employment, the number of firms, and industrial real estate prices. The effects are concentrated in Mafia-dominated sectors and in municipalities where fewer incumbents are re-elected. The dismissals generate large economic returns by weakening the Mafia and fostering trust in local institutions. The analysis suggests that CCDs represent an effective intervention for establishing legitimacy and spurring economic activity in areas dominated by organized crime.

This paper studies the regional differences in the productivity of Italian Social Security Agency offices and whether they can be explained by differences in manager characteristics. Despite large dispersion in productivity across offices, most of the variation in productivity is within, rather than across, regions. Managers are an important determinant of office productivity, but differences in their characteristics explain little of the cross-region differences in productivity. Because most of the variation in office productivity is within- rather than across-regions, reassigning more productive managers to larger and more productive offices increases total (and within-region) inequality in output while decreasing across-region inequality.

This paper reassesses the conventional wisdom that public-sector jobs have worse pay but better amenities than equivalent private-sector jobs, using data from 22 European countries and the United States. Earnings gaps are shown to be heterogeneous across countries—public sector work carries a premium in Europe but a penalty in the US. However, whereas European public-sector workers report better job amenities—better job security and work–life balance—than their private-sector counterparts, there are no public–private amenity differentials for the US. Public-sector work also has fewer pay-for-performance schemes. Finally, the public sector does not seem to ensure a fairer work environment, compared to the private sector, in terms of workplace discrimination and harassment. These stylized facts inform the external validity of extrapolating individual case studies to different contexts.

Measuring the performance of government agencies is notoriously hard due to the lack of comparable data. At the same time, governments around the world generate an immense amount of data that detail their day-to-day operations. In this chapter, we focus on three functions of government that represent the bulk of their operations and that are fairly standardized: social security programs, public procurement, and tax collection. We discuss how public sector organizations can use existing administrative case data and re-purpose them to construct objective measures of performance. We argue that it is paramount to compare cases that are homogeneous or construct a metric that captures the complexity of the case. We also argue that the metrics of government performance should capture both the volumes of services provided as well as their quality. With these considerations in mind, case data can be at the core of a diagnostic system with the potential to transform the speed and quality of public service delivery.

Treatment practices vary widely across hospitals, often with little connection to patients’ medical needs. We assess impacts of these differences in delivery practices at childbirth. We find that infants quasi-randomly delivered at hospitals with higher c-section rates are born in better shape and are less likely to be readmitted, with suggestive evidence of improved survival. These benefits are driven by avoidance of prolonged labors that pose risks to infant health. In contrast, these infants are more likely to visit the emergency department for respiratory-related problems, consistent with a large observational literature linking c-section to chronic reductions in respiratory health.

This paper studies the impacts of managers in the administrative public sector using novel Italian administrative data containing an output-based measure of productivity. Exploiting the rotation of managers across sites, I find that a one standard deviation increase in managerial talent raises office productivity by 10%. These gains are driven primarily by the exit of older workers who retire when more productive managers take over. I use these estimates to evaluate the optimal allocation of managers to offices. I find that assigning better managers to the largest and most productive offices would increase output by at least 6.9%.

When performance incentives are weak, working from home (WFH) can entail significant risks, such as reduced effort or shirking. This paper estimates the individual-level treatment effects of WFH on worker productivity in public sector jobs. Exploiting novel administrative data and exogenous variation in work location, we find that WFH instead increases productivity by 12% on average, with considerable heterogeneity across workers. These gains are primarily driven by reduced distractions and are not explained by changes in work quality, hours worked, absenteeism, characteristics of reported cases, training, administrative duties, or task allocation. When tasks are assigned by a supervisor, productivity gains nearly double.

This paper studies whether management consultancy may be an effective tool to change managerial practices in the public sector. We design a management intervention aimed at reducing dropout rates and improving students’ outcomes and implement it in a randomly selected set of vocational schools in Greece. Our intervention reduces students’ dropouts by 2.8 to 3.5 percentage points (p.p.) — approximately a 10% reduction in dropout rates. By the end of the first year of the intervention, students in treated schools are 5.5 p.p. more likely to have been assigned an apprenticeship at a local firm and have been, on average, placed in an apprenticeship approximately a month earlier than students in control schools. On average, students in treatment schools spend an additional 7.3 days working at their local firm, and their contracts are about a month longer. Importantly, the extra time spent on their apprenticeship does not come at the cost of lower attendance in school.

This paper examines the effects of the 2025 U.S. federal personnel reforms. Using a difference-in-differences design, we document a persistent decline in federal employment, employee engagement, and job satisfaction, alongside a temporary increase in burnout and job search activity. Subjective well-being also declines and remains depressed, indicating spillovers beyond the workplace. Effects are heterogeneous by political affiliation, with large responses among Democrats and Independents and muted responses among Republicans. We find no evidence of partisan differences in attrition, suggesting that deteriorating attitudes did not translate into sustained labor market exits or changes in workforce composition.