"Affordable Social investment as no-regret Policy"

"Conservative and innovative policy change in labour market reforms. A policy process-based explanatory framework" abstract The main explanations of labour policy reforms focus on either endogenous or exogenous factors that have triggered change in some specific critical junctures. As such, they seek to explain the introduction of reforms, i.e. why policy change occured. By contrast, building on theories of…

"Gender Equality Perceptions, Division of Paid And Unpaid Work, And Partnership Dissolution In Sweden" at Campus Luigi Einaudi abstract With the increase in female employment and the decrease in gender labor specialization there has also been a marked change in gender role attitudes. An increasing proportion of women and men has come to prefer gender…

"Institutional Roots of Economic Decline: Lessons from Italy"  

"The Design of Fiscal Governance Rules of the European Union"

"The employment-pension nexus in Coordinated Market Economies: a Comparative Study of Germany and Japan since 2001" abstract This presentation analyses the implications of the pension reforms for employment relationships and HR policies in the two prime examples of coordinated market economies (CME), Germany and Japan, in the past 10 years.  While studies of recent public…

"Politicization without democratization: The impact of the Eurozone crisis on EU constitutionalism" abstract The paper will demonstrate how the European integration process overburdened EU law in an attempt to overcome political deficiencies, with negative consequences for the Union’s democratic legitimacy. The analysis is framed by the ‘twin crises’ of twenty-first century EU constitutionalism: the defeat…

"Upgrading in Spain: an institutional perspective" abstract This paper summarises the main contributions of a book manuscript that aimed to explain the recent rise of Spain’s firms in complex service sectors, and the parallel fall in capital and skill intensive manufacturing sectors through the analysis of the institutional structure that enabled it. I argued that…

"Within-Couple Inequality in Earnings and the Relative Motherhood Penalty. A Cross-National Study of European Countries" abstract While much research has focused on the difference in earnings between childless women and men, mothers and fathers, somewhat less is known on the difference in earnings between women and their partners. This article investigates within couple earnings inequality…

"Social class and subjective well-being: a cross-country comparison" abstract In almost every country, individuals in the upper class enjoy, on average, higher subjective well being (SWB) than individuals in the lower class. However, the size of the SWB gap varies signicantly across countries; in other words, class seems to determine SWB to a greater extent in…

"The legacy of Europe: Studying post-URBAN area-based regeneration in two Italian cities" abstract Despite its largely institutionalist orientation, the literature on Europeanization so far has paid little attention to issues of time. In particular, often overlooked in models of Europeanization is the question of how durable any EU-induced domestic change is, especially in the face…

"The Return of Religion? Faith based welfare provision in a Neo-Liberal Age" abstract Churches were for centuries the major institutional providers of welfare before the state took over this role in late 19th century Europe. With the advent of modernization theory the origins of modern welfare in religion were increasingly regarded as fossils from a distant past.…

"At the Starting Line: Rural Poverty and Inequality among Hispanic Newborns" Abstract The recent movement of Hispanics into rural immigrant destinations has sometimes deflected attention from another major source of rural population growth – fertility. High rates of Hispanic fertility raise an important question: Do Hispanic newborn babies start life’s race behind the starting line,…

"Policy without politics? Domestic agendas, market pressures and "informal but tough" economic conditionality in the Italian labour market reform"

"Child care in Italy: are there social class differences in the access to services?" abstract Child care has become increasingly central in the debate about the transformation and the recalibration of the welfare state. If the welfare state debate until the 1990s was mainly centered around policy fields such as pensions and unemployment benefits (Esping-Andersen,…

"Is America Going to Become Less Conservative?:  Immigrants, Place of Settlement and Partisan Acquisition." Abstract As Latinos become the largest ethnic minority in the United States, commentators have argued that their presence will eventually shift the partisan composition of even the most conservative states.  Will it?  There are competing research findings on mobility and partisanship.  One strand suggests…

"What Things Can We Do with Words? Answers from Italian Fascism (1919–1922) and Georgia Lynchings (1875–1930)" abstract The talk illustrates a quantitative social science approach to texts developed by the author, Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). QNA relies on computer-assisted story grammars to analyze narrative, where a story grammar is the simple Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure. In…

"The changing political economy of  self-employment in Italy" abstract This presentation is based on a research on self-employment carried out in 2010-12 in Italy, and published in a book in 2012 (C. Ranci, (ed.) Partite Iva. Il lavoro autonomo nella crisi italiana, Il Mulino, 2012). The research was focused on a general reconstruction of the…

"Taking the Cloak Off the DAG:  The New Frontier of Causal Analysis in the Social Sciences" Abstract The counterfactual approach to causal analysis will continue to transform the social sciences in the next decade.  The potential outcome model, which was largely developed in statistics and economics between 1975 and 2005, has now been joined by…