Redistribution at the Local Level: The Case of Public Childcare in Italy

Alessandro Bucciol, Laura Cavalli, Paolo Pertile, Veronica Polin and Alessandro Sommacal ()
Additional contact information
Alessandro Sommacal: Department of Economics (University of Verona)

No 21/2013, Working Papers from University of Verona, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the determinants of redistribution at the municipal level in the context of public childcare in Italy. Within a substantially homogeneous legislative framework, different municipalities autonomously define how participation fees vary with a compound indicator of income and wealth (ISEE), thus redistributing resources across households using the service. The nearly one hundred municipalities we take into account exhibit wide heterogeneity in redistributive attitudes. We find statistically significant correlations of these with a number of individual characteristics of policy-makers and municipalities, but not with those of the ex-ante distribution of income, which should be central according to both normative and positive theory. Since the price of public childcare is subsidized, resources are also redistributed from tax-payers to users. The evidence that we find is consistent with the hypothesis that this type of redistribution is a public good.

Keywords: redistribution; progressivity; childcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 H42 H71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-nps and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dse.univr.it/home/workingpapers/wp2013n21.pdf First version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Redistribution at the local level: the case of public childcare in Italy (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ver:wpaper:21/2013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Verona, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Reiter ().