Political Economy, Urban and Migration

Sara Giunti, Andrea Guariso, Mariapia Mendola and Irene Solmone

5,000 stundents enrolled in 240 classes, across 40 high-schools in the city of Milan and Genova in Italy

Major demographic shifts and global changes have contributed to the increasing diversity in the composition of the population in Italy. The country has been relentlessly involved in population aging and demographic decline, while at the same time turning from a historical emigration country to a major destination for (young) migrants and asylum seekers from neighbouring regions. This change in the demographic composition has significant implications for social integration at the local level, with major challenges posed by hostile attitudes towards immigrants and minority groups, including prejudices, discrimination, and xenophobia. This project investigates the potential role of educational programs in shaping attitudes toward immigrants and cultural diversity among youth, with the final goal of designing effective integration policies for inter-group relations and an inclusive society.

We will conduct a randomized evaluation of a program designed to foster intercultural dialogue and social inclusion through perspective-taking activities that can encourage students to break down stereotypes and consider cultural diversity and integration as a value. The program is implemented by the Italian-based NGO Helpcode and has been created by a multidisciplinary team of social scientists, pedagogical consultants, and multimedia developers within a framework of ‘active learning’.

The study will involve 240 high-school classes, across 40 schools located in the provinces of the two Italian cities of Milano and Genova. Due to resource constraints, the program can only be delivered to 120 classes during the school year 2022-2023. Other classes will be covered in the future, depending on the success of this initial phase and on future funding availability. The classes that will receive the program in this initial phase will be randomly selected among available classes within each target school. We will then conduct two rounds of data collection (baseline and endline), surveying a sample of about 5,000 students. Our primary outcome of interest will be attitudes towards migrants, as captured through a combination of measures, that include the Implicit Association Test (IAT), behavioural games, and self-reported measures. Our surveys will also allow us to capture a wider range of outcomes and discuss the mechanisms behind the observed impact.

We expect this study to provide new insights that can directly inform practitioners and policymakers to design programs and policies aimed at handling the complexity of population changes and creating an open and inclusive society.

Nicola Mastrorocco (University of Bologna and TIME) with Edoardo Teso (Northwestern Kellog and CEPR)

about 1 million employee-year observation

Political Economy, History, Development

We study how the organization of the state evolves over the process of development of a nation, using a new dataset on the internal organization of the U.S. federal bureaucracy over 1817- 1905. First, we show a series of novel facts, describing how the size of the state, its presence across the territory, and its key organizational features evolved over the nineteenth century. Second, exploiting the staggered expansion of the railroad and telegraph networks across space, we show that the ability of politicians to monitor state agents throughout the territory is an important driver of these facts: locations with lower transportation and communication costs with Washington DC have more state presence, are delegated more decision power, and have lower employee turnover. The results suggest that high monitoring costs are associated with small, personalistic state organizations based on networks of trust; technological innovations lowering monitoring costs facilitate the emergence of modern bureaucratic states.

Martina Kirchberger, Carol Newman, Vincent Thorne, Sveta Milusheva

3.5 million people within an area of 550 km²

2018 - ongoing

Urban Mobility

As is common to many large cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, the predominantly young population of Senegal faces limited opportunities for participation in the formal labour market. The high job insecurity and labour informality, especially among the poor and the youth, raises major concerns about how to provide jobs and livelihoods for Africa’s youth. Rapid population growth and urbanization is also placing substantial demands on Africa’s infrastructure with major investments in public infrastructure, including transport, telecommunications, and public housing, crucially needed. The labour-intensive nature of such projects provides an opportunity for job creation in the sector, which is one of the main sectors of employment for young men particularly. This Impact Evaluation (IE) aims to study and quantify the impacts of these jobs on workers, focusing on two questions in particular: (i) What are the net short and medium-term effects on worker welfare and future employability of offering jobs in the construction sector to low-skilled workers? (ii) What are the short and medium-term effects of offering non-cognitive training to construction workers on welfare and on obtaining a job after finalizing their current contract? To answer the first question, we will use the BRT construction and conduct a randomized control trial (RTC). For the second question, we test a training intervention focused on non-cognitive skills, in particular conscientiousness. The results will provide governments with estimates of the benefits of complementary worker training when it undertakes the building of large infrastructure projects.