Local inequalities of the COVID-19 crisis.

This paper assesses the pandemic's impact on Italian local economies with the newly developed machine learning control method for counterfactual building. Our results document that the economic effects of the COVID-19 shock vary dramatically across the Italian territory and are spatially uncorrelated with the epidemiological pattern of the first wave. The largest employment losses occurred in areas characterized by high exposure to social aggregation risks and pre-existing labor market fragilities. Lastly, we show that the hotspots of the COVID-19 crisis do not overlap with those of the Great Recession. These findings call for a place-based policy response to address the uneven economic geography of the pandemic.

Plant different, eat different? Insights from participatory agricultural research.

We examine the association between on-farm production diversity on household dietary diversity in Malawi using microdata collected as part of an environmentally sustainable agricultural intensification program. The program primarily focuses on the integration of legumes into the cropping system through maize-legume intercropping and legume-legume intercropping. Relative to staple cereals such as maize, legumes are rich in micronutrients, contain better-quality protein, and lead to nitrogen fixation. Given the systematic difference we document between program beneficiaries and randomly sampled non-beneficiary (control) households, we employ causal instrumental variables mediation analysis to account for non-random selection and possible simultaneity between production and consumption decisions. We find a significant positive treatment effect on dietary diversity, led by an increase in production diversity. Analysis of potential pathways show that effects on dietary diversity stem mostly from consumption of diverse food items purchased from the market made possible through higher agricultural income. These findings highlight that, while increasing production for markets can enhance dietary diversity through higher income that would make affordable an expanded set of food items, the production of more nutritious crops such as pulses may not necessarily translate into greater own consumption. This may be due to the persistence of dietary habits, tastes, or other local factors that favor consumption of staples such as maize and encourage sales of more profitable and nutritious food items such as pulses. Pulses are a more affordable and environmentally sustainable source of protein than animal source food, and efforts should be made to enhance their nutritional awareness and contribution to sustainable food systems and healthier diets.

Local mortality estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy.

Estimates of the real death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic have proven to be problematic in many countries, Italy being no exception. Mortality estimates at the local level are even more uncertain as they require stringent conditions, such as granularity and accuracy of the data at hand, which are rarely met. The "official" approach adopted by public institutions to estimate the "excess mortality" during the pandemic draws on a comparison between observed all-cause mortality data for 2020 and averages of mortality figures in the past years for the same period. In this paper, we apply the recently developed machine learning control method to build a more realistic counterfactual scenario of mortality in the absence of COVID-19. We demonstrate that supervised machine learning techniques outperform the official method by substantially improving the prediction accuracy of the local mortality in "ordinary" years, especially in small- and medium-sized municipalities. We then apply the best-performing algorithms to derive estimates of local excess mortality for the period between February and September 2020. Such estimates allow us to provide insights about the demographic evolution of the first wave of the pandemic throughout the country. To help improve diagnostic and monitoring efforts, our dataset is freely available to the research community. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00148-021-00857-y.