Economics

This paper reviews recent developments in the economics of human development, focusing on the early years of life as a critical period for shaping long-term outcomes. Early childhood development is inherently multidimensional: cognitive and socioemotional skills evolve dynamically and interact with health, nutrition, and environmental influences. Economists have contributed to this field by providing a conceptual unifying framework that highlights how key drivers of development reflect the choices of individuals operating under incentives and constraints. Within this framework, the paper emphasizes two central challenges: understanding the interactions among multiple dimensions of developmen..

Using data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we explore whether the recent pension reforms enacted in Italy had an impact on the inequality in health among individuals. We construct a set of indexes measuring several health outcomes (both physical and mental) and analyze their evolution along time (across SHARE waves) from 2004 to 2022, by relating them to the households’ income. While we can observe some differences in the health-income gradient between genders, we do not find evidence of a positive relationship between the introduction of the pension reforms and an increase in inequality.

Older home sellers receive lower returns than younger home sellers. Homes sold by older people have fewer major renovations but higher rates of poor upkeep. Older sellers are also more likely to sell off-MLS (“pocket listings”) and to sell to investors, leading to lower prices. These patterns suggest that older sellers may be disproportionately disadvantaged by agents’ incentive to maximize fees through generating high sales volume instead of maximizing sale prices. Age-related cognitive decline makes the elderly more vulnerable. For causal evidence, we show that reforms making pocket listings more transparent reduced both the prevalence of pocket listings and the magnitude of the age ..

Direct-to-consumer advertising is pervasive in US healthcare markets, but little evidence exists on the effects of advertising by hospitals, second only to drug manufacturers in medical marketing. Advertising may help facilities increase market share by stealing existing patients, expand the market for hospital care, or do both. Regardless, it has important public finance implications due to the large sums of taxpayer funds spent by federal and state governments to subsidize hospital operations and finance care through public insurance programs. This paper provides the first causal evidence, to our knowledge, on the market expansion effects of hospital advertising. To obtain causal estimates..