NRRP projects
Department of Economics

Population ageing is a major, and unprecedented, 21st century phenomenon. As a trend, it concerns the whole world, both in terms of increasing chances for individuals to reach old age (even if not necessarily in good health), and of a rising share of older people over the total population. Global ageing is driven by the reductions in fertility and improvements in survival, typically occurring through the demographic transition. Hence, the demographic transition has triggered several dynamic processes involving society, markets, welfare states, cultural and political change, within a global interconnected system. Ageing is a multi-faceted complex process, presenting challenges and risks, but also offering ground-breaking opportunities to promote inclusive well-being for the society as a whole.

The Age-It programme follows the view of the World Health Organization, which promotes an “active and healthy ageing” framework concept (WHO 2015). Accordingly, ageing is not considered as a time of mere decline in mental and physical functioning, leading to a condition of health and socioeconomic dependency that makes older people a “social problem”, but rather as a period of life in which individuals can use their maturity to represent a precious resource for society, and an opportunity for building economically prosperous, socially just, and environmentally sustainable societies. Italy is leading global ageing: 23.3% of the population is 65 or older, life expectancy in 2015-20 is among the highest in the world, both at birth (83.3 years) and at the age of 65 (21.1 years), with current very low levels of fertility (1.24 children per women in 2020).

This position as a frontrunner of ageing, together with the country’s extraordinary regional disparities (North vs. South, Coastal vs. Inland, Rural vs. Urban), make Italy the ideal “empirical laboratory” to address how different combinations of biological, clinical, cultural and socioeconomic factors, in addition to a variety of institutional responses by health and social care systems to the ageing process, are leading to different individual and societal outcomes. Nonetheless, structural bottlenecks have hampered the advancement of research: the prevalence of discipline-specific analytical frameworks, the limited transdisciplinary collaboration, the scattered availability of data, and the difficulty in translating the various scientific studies into policies. Likewise, the less-than-optimal opportunities for public-private and for academic and professional collaboration have so far limited the scope for transferring new research findings into practise or for contributing to a coherent national active and healthy ageing strategy.

The economic, financial and geo-political crises of the last two decades along with the pandemic have left a tangible imprint on socio-economic conditions in Italy, increased inequalities and put a shadow on the growth prospects of entire communities that are increasingly put under stress by socio-economic, political and health shocks. The negative impacts on communities and territories are compounded by ongoing long-term processes related to slow productivity growth, climate change and structural dynamics. Furthermore, the progressive intensification of economic and financial integration, the growing scale of migration and international conflicts transmission increasingly make politico-economic shocks more global, harder to foresee and more difficult to handle both at the national and at the local level.

In this context, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) offers an unprecedented opportunity reduce important gaps and to make the system more resilient, inclusive and sustainable in the face of shocks and long-term transformations. While the process of implementation of these plans is vital, it is fraught with challenges. The massive scale of investments involved in the process and the compressed time horizon available for its implementation is a further source of stress for the system and a potential risk for social cohesion and the sustainability of private and public debts. The depth of the required reforms associated to the green, digital and sustainable mobility transitions and the associated societal transformations require a far from trivial process of adaptation.

The actors of the system, firms, households and public administrations, face complex and changing environments and need to make choices under uncertainty, often under limited information and often facing limitations in their ability to process it and use if proficiently. For instance, households need to make financial, labour, and consumption choices that require an increasingly deep understanding of changing market conditions and public regulations and that often require the ability to use digital technologies effectively. Similarly, resilient firms, need to foresee future scenario and adapt their organization modes, adjust production strategies and make risky investments, among many others.

An effective and sustainable provision of public services by the public sector rests on well-working and transparent administrations, a careful design of policies, a clear understanding of citizens’ needs and the ability to plan financial sustainability and debts over the long-run. The public and private research system can play a fundamental role in supporting actors in their choices by responding to these needs, by providing useful knowledge and support for the implementation of key enabling technologies, like financial sustainability instruments, strategies for innovative ecosystems and circular economies, and low carbon policies and support territorial and social cohesion by offering evidence-based advices to policy makers.

All this requires high-quality, timely, easy to access and usable data from different sources as well as effective and user-friendly tools for data analysis and supporting knowledge transfers and the design of evidence-based public policies.

GRINS aims at developing an integrated set of geo-referenced heterogeneous databases for the study of the evolution of the economic and social conditions of the Italian local areas and of the economic system as a whole. 

Specifically, the research will focus on: 

1. environment, that is, the evolution of climatic conditions, the mapping of significant natural risks, and pollution data; 
2. economic-social and health, that is, the analysis of heterogeneous information on sentiment, mobility, consumption, health, as well as the performance of economic activities; 
3. finance, for the analysis of the relationship between environmental dynamics, evolution of risk profiles.

Middle-term and long-term sustainability of the debt of different stakeholders (State, households, firms) will be tackled.

Income inequality in OECD countries is at its highest level. In addition, the recent pandemic has not helped to close the income gap. This widening gap has spurred economists to investigate the subject more deeply. To their results, it is now widely believed that greater levels of income inequality in a country are associated with lower levels of social mobility.

In a competitive society like ours, where jobs, promotions, and places at university are assigned through contest-like mechanisms, the rising inequality can have critical effects. For example, it is often mentioned that low-income individuals lack the resources to compete for high-income jobs, an issue also raised by David Sassoli (2020): "[...] for too many decades, those who are born poor remain poor. Social mobility, so important for my generation, has stalled for too long. That is why Parliament is calling for greater ambition."

This project contributes to the debate by building an innovative dynamic model of contests that relates inequality to social mobility and growth. It relates inequality to social mobility by employing a model of noisy contests (Tullock, 1980; Clark and Riis, 1996) rather than a deterministic one (auctions). Further, it includes growth by assuming that the contest repeats over time and rewards are performance-dependent. The higher the players’ performances, the greater the sum of the prizes available.

InMOBILIS expects to provide not only policy recommendations on how the appropriate use of redistributive policies and investments in education can sustain social mobility, well-being, and growth in the long run but also novel theoretical findings that can serve as a benchmark for policy suggestions and future empirical research on the topic.

The proposed project aims to increase our understanding of the factors that allow rumours and misinformation to spread on (online) social networks. Given the global corona pandemic and the rise of the so-called “post-truth” society, the harm that misinformation may cause has been recognized, and it can hardly be overstated.

Political examples of this harm abound. While the literature has come a long way in uncovering various factors that influence the diffusion of misinformation, it is still not perfectly understood. However, only increased understanding will allow us to fight the persistence of misinformation and rumours. This project aims to employ theoretical, empirical, and simulation tools to: 

1. uncover motivations to share unverified information;
2. model how ideological identity groups may form on a network;
3. analyze how specific network characteristics interact with information characteristics to either hinder or help the diffusion of information.

This work is built on earlier work, funded through an MSCA fellowship, and is part of a long-term research subject, whose aim it is to find efficient ways to deal with the spread of misinformation without impacting freedom of expression.