register
Alessandro Cigno

University of Florence, Italy, and IZA, Germany

IZA World of Labor role

Author

Current position

Professor of Economics, University of Florence, Italy

Research interest

Household economics, child labor, optimal fiscal treatment of families, design of pension systems

Website

http://bit.ly/Cigno_IZApage

Past positions

University of Pisa, University of Hull, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Qualifications

PhD, Mathematical Economics, University of Birmingham, 1972

Selected publications

  • “Taxing family size and subsidizing child-specific commodities?” Journal of Public Economics 84 (2002): 75–90 (with A. Pettini).

  • “Does globalization increase child labor?” (with F. C. Rosati and L. Guarcello), World Development 30 (2002): 1579-1589.

  • “Transfers to families with children as a principal-agent problem” (with A. Luporini and A. Pettini), Journal of Public Economics 87 (2003): 1165-1172.

  • The Economics of Child Labour. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 (with F. Rosati).

  • “How to deal with covert child labor and give children an effective education, in a poor developing country.” World Bank Economic Review 26:1 (2012): 61–77.

article(s)

  • Trade, foreign investment, and wage inequality in developing countries

    Exposure to foreign trade raises the skill premium in countries with a large stock of educated workers and reduces it in others

    Alessandro Cigno, November 2015
    Liberalization of foreign trade and investment raises the domestic ratio of skilled to unskilled wages (skill premium) if the country has a sufficiently well-educated workforce, but lowers it otherwise. Wide wage inequality is undesirable on equity grounds, especially in poor countries where the bottom wage is close to the breadline; but it gives parents an incentive to invest in their children’s education. The incentive will be ineffective, however, if parents cannot borrow for their child’s education because of underdeveloped credit markets or because they are too poor to finance the investment from their own income and savings.
    MoreLess