Essays in Applied Economics

This work includes the results of a broad research carried out during the PhD course in Economics and Political Economy at the University of Genoa. The first part of this thesis consists of two studies that can be ascribed to the literature on the rural and urban divide. In particular, the First Chapter is devoted to build a new indicator able to capture the EU-28 territorial heterogeneity. Following Pagliacci (2016), the Fuzzy Rurality Indicator (FRI) is a multidimensional index that defines a more appropriate way to describe the rural-urban continuum, taking into account three thematic approaches: sector-based, demographic and territorial. The results show a clear turnaround, especially with respect to the Eurostat classification, highlighting a prevalent rural continent. The main contributions of the chapter to the literature are the new taxonomy that defines rural and urban areas and the discovery that Europe is prevalently a rural continent. This shortcoming is crucial as identifying territorial differences has important policy implications. The identification of territorial characteristics is a key element also for the Second Chapter of the thesis. This contribution is written during my visiting period at the European Commission Joint Research Centre and deals with the ex-post evaluation of the Common Agricultural Policy in the period 2011-2015. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the most ancient European Union (EU) policies which has evolved overtime. Traditionally, the CAP supports farmers’ activities and maintains fair prices for agricultural producers and consumers; more recently, its objectives include promoting a balanced territorial development in order to reduce the rural-urban divide across and within Member States. Therefore, the CAP has turned into a policy characterised by many instruments which allow all the actors involved (farmers, MS, consumers, etc…) to adopt different implementation choices. The current study considers the CAP as a multivalued discrete treatment and infers impact causality through the Generalized Propensity Score (GPS), approach developed by Imbens (2000). Beyond the baseline treatment (Low CAP), the other CAP policy mixes are based on the access to three main types of CAP funds (Direct Payments, Market Measures and Rural Development). The analysis refers to the period 2011-2015 for the EU-28 NUTS3 regions and focuses on three outcomes (GDP per capita, Gross Value Added in Agriculture and Employment in Agriculture). Main results show that Direct Payments positively affect GDP per capita, while Market Measures and Rural Development mainly foster agricultural employment and agricultural productivity. Furthermore, another contribution of this work regards the concept of convergence between rural and urban regions which are defined in the new and innovative way that is described in the first chapter of this thesis. The second part of this work consists of a study that belong to the literature on the process of place naming in relation to political and cultural changes. Streets names reflect the commemorative decisions of a community since they represent not only the historical and political causes of naming and renaming process that a city experiences, but also social and cultural values. Since history is written by winners, minorities are usually underrepresented in commemorative streets names. Women surely do not constitute a minority, but they are historically excluded from the public sphere and, consequently, they do not frequently appear in street names. This study, exploiting street names as source of geographical and cultural data, aims to analyse individual perception towards gender equality through urban toponymy in Italian municipalities. Specifically, different specifications of a Probit model are estimated to observe how a change in the ratio of streets named after women is related to the probability of an individual to have a more equitable gender perception. Results show that, even when controlling for a complete set of geographic, socio economic and historical controls, in the Italian municipalities with a higher percentage of streets named after female, there is more awareness about gender bias and a greater attitude towards gender equality, even if still far from parity.