arXiv subjects

Francesco Serti

Publications and source records attributed to Francesco Serti.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

The temporary impact of permanent employment incentives: Evidence from Italy

This paper evaluates the short and medium-term effectiveness of payroll tax reductions aimed at promoting the permanent conversion of temporary contracts through social contribution exemptions. Using rich administrative data from Tuscany, providing detailed employment histories, we exploit a unique change in eligibility criteria in 2018 to estimate the causal impact of these exemptions. We find that the incentives immediately increased the probability of conversion, with no evidence of substitution against non-eligible cohorts. However, these positive effects were short-lived and appear to reflect anticipated conversions. Indeed, in the medium term, we find no persistent effects on a broad set of employment outcomes -- including whether the worker remains in the same permanent job, holds any permanent position, continues working in the same firm or sector, and how long has kept working -- and no evidence of heterogeneous effects across firm or worker characteristics.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Learning to Import through Production Networks

Using administrative data on the universe of inter-firm transactions in Spain, we show that firms learn to import from their domestic suppliers and customers. Our identification strategy exploits the panel structure of the data, the firm-time variation across import origins, and the network structure. We find evidence of both upstream and downstream network effects, even after accounting for sectoral and spatial spillovers. We estimate that an increase of 10 percentage points in the share of suppliers (customers) that are importing from a given region increases the probability of starting importing from that region by 10.7\% (19.2\%). Connections with geographically distant domestic firms provide more useful information to start importing. Larger firms are more responsive to this information but less likely to disseminate it.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

Assessing the Heterogeneous Impact of Economy-Wide Shocks: A Machine Learning Approach Applied to Colombian Firms

Our paper presents a methodology to study the heterogeneous effects of economy-wide shocks and applies it to the case of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on exports. This methodology is applicable in scenarios where the pervasive nature of the shock hinders the identification of a control group unaffected by the shock, as well as the ex-ante definition of the intensity of the shock's exposure of each unit. In particular, our study investigates the effectiveness of various Machine Learning (ML) techniques in predicting firms' trade and, by building on recent developments in causal ML, uses these predictions to reconstruct the counterfactual distribution of firms' trade under different COVID-19 scenarios and to study treatment effect heterogeneity. Specifically, we focus on the probability of Colombian firms surviving in the export market under two different scenarios: a COVID-19 setting and a non-COVID-19 counterfactual situation. On average, we find that the COVID-19 shock decreased a firm's probability of surviving in the export market by about 20 percentage points in April 2020. We study the treatment effect heterogeneity by employing a classification analysis that compares the characteristics of the firms on the tails of the estimated distribution of the individual treatment effects.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

Religiosity and Innovation Attitudes: An Instrumental Variables Analysis

Estimating the influence of religion on innovation is challenging because of both complexness and endogeneity. In order to untangle these issues, we use several measures of religiosity, adopt an individual-level approach to innovation and employ the instrumental variables method. We analyse the effect of religiosity on individual attitudes that are either favourable or unfavourable to innovation, presenting an individual's propensity to innovate. We instrument one's religiosity with the average religiosity of people of the same sex, age range, and religious affiliation who live in countries with the same dominant religious denomination. The results strongly suggest that each measure of religiosity has a somewhat negative effect on innovation attitudes. The diagnostic test results and sensitivity analyses support the main findings. We propose three causality channels from religion to innovation: time allocation, the fear of uncertainty, and conventional roles reinforced by religion.

econ.GN↗