Fbk-Irvapp - Research Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies

03/09/2026

Ultimo giorno per iscriversi al corso CAPIRE - AI Literacy per la Pubblica Amministrazione! 👇

L'intelligenza artificiale pone nuove sfide e richiede competenze che vanno oltre la tecnologia: capacità di valutazione critica, consapevolezza etica e conoscenza del quadro normativo.

Per approfondire questi temi la Fondazione Bruno Kessler organizza "𝗖𝗔𝗣𝗜𝗥𝗘 - 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘇𝗲 𝗱𝗶 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘇𝗮 𝗔𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗮 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮 𝗔𝗺𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲: 𝗜𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘇𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲, 𝗥𝗶𝗳𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮 𝗲𝗱 𝗘𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮", un corso gratuito rivolto al personale della Pubblica Amministrazione.

🔎Il percorso prevede 8 lezioni online con due edizioni: dal 29 settembre al 22 ottobre oppure dal 10 novembre al 3 dicembre 2026.
Le iscrizioni sono aperte fino al 4 settembre 2026.

◾Programma completo ed iscrizioni disponibili qui: https://www.fbk.eu/it/event/37435/capire-competenze-di-intelligenza-artificiale-per-la-pubblica-amministrazione-istruzione-riflessione-critica-ed-etica/

03/09/2026

A great few days at the Fourth International Conference of Scuola Democratica, taking place at Sapienza Università di Roma this week!

FBK-IRVAPP presented two studies as part of the panel "Economic Constraints in Educational Participation and the Design of New Policies", exploring how economic constraints continue to affect participation to education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Both contributions from FBK-IRVAPP researchers focused on incentivised savings programmes implemented across Italy.

Olga Gorodetskaya and Luigina Jessica Montano presented preliminary insights from the ongoing evaluation of PUOI, to shed light on some of the barriers to participation in incentivised saving programmes that are often perceived as "too good to be true". Lack of trust and capacity to commit to long-term planning as well as a lack of "mental space" of families facing financial hardship play a crucial role in bringing families on board.

Antonina Mazara presented the results from an RCT evaluating the impact of a WILL, a matched-savings programme, showing gains in family savings, students' aspirations, attendance and grade progression as a result of the programme.

A big thanks to Raffaella Dispenza (ACLI - Associazioni Cristiane Lavoratori Italiani) and William Revello (Fondazione Ufficio Pio) for putting together such a stimulating panel — great food for thought!

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

31/08/2026

Ancora pochi giorni per iscriversi 👇

L'intelligenza artificiale pone nuove sfide e richiede competenze che vanno oltre la tecnologia: capacità di valutazione critica, consapevolezza etica e conoscenza del quadro normativo.

Per approfondire questi temi la Fondazione Bruno Kessler organizza "𝗖𝗔𝗣𝗜𝗥𝗘 - 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘇𝗲 𝗱𝗶 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘇𝗮 𝗔𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗮 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮 𝗔𝗺𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲: 𝗜𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘇𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲, 𝗥𝗶𝗳𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗰𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮 𝗲𝗱 𝗘𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮", un corso gratuito rivolto al personale della Pubblica Amministrazione.

🔎Il percorso prevede 8 lezioni online con due edizioni: dal 29 settembre al 22 ottobre oppure dal 10 novembre al 3 dicembre 2026.
Le iscrizioni sono aperte fino al 4 settembre 2026.

◾Programma completo ed iscrizioni disponibili qui: https://www.fbk.eu/it/event/37435/capire-competenze-di-intelligenza-artificiale-per-la-pubblica-amministrazione-istruzione-riflessione-critica-ed-etica/

25/08/2026

📣 Following a brief summer break, IRVAPP seminars are back!

We are pleased to invite you to the following hybrid seminar: "Manipulation testing based on Benford’s Law for discrete scores" with Marco Ventura from Sapienza Università di Roma.

Further details and instructions to join are available at the link below ⬇️

https://irvapp.fbk.eu/events/detail/30506/manipulation-testing-based-on-benfords-law-for-discrete-scores-marco-ventura-sapienza-university-of-rome-2026/

06/08/2026

Quando eventi calamitosi di dimensione regionale vengono classificati come emergenze nazionali, le procedure possono allungarsi e gli indennizzi arrivare in ritardo.

Su Lavoce.info Gianfranco Cerea, Greta Sofia Lampis e Annalisa Tassi analizzano il divario tra la sussidiarietà prevista dalle norme e l'accentramento di fatto della gestione delle emergenze.

Attraverso i dati sulle alluvioni e le frane dell’ultimo decennio, il confronto tra i diversi modelli di gestione adottati dopo la tempesta Vaia e l’esame di alcune calamità avvenute in Lombardia, mostrano come il ricorso alla dichiarazione di emergenza a livello nazionale possa rallentare interventi che le amministrazioni regionali sarebbero in grado di affrontare direttamente.

L’articolo propone criteri più chiari per distinguere le emergenze regionali da quelle nazionali, maggiori poteri di ordinanza per le Regioni e forme di compartecipazione alla spesa capaci di rendere più coerenti responsabilità e incentivi.

Leggi l'articolo:

https://lavoce.info/archives/112207/stato-di-emergenza-in-stato-di-attesa/

Calamità di dimensione regionale e relativamente contenuta vengono spesso classificate come emergenze nazionali, con procedure più lunghe e ritardi negli indennizzi. La correzione potrebbe consistere nella compartecipazione alle spese delle regioni.

15/07/2026

📣 New publication alert by FBK-IRVAPP researchers Sergiu Burlacu Davide Azzolini Federico Podesta'

❓ Question
Despite integrated classrooms and other targeted policies, there are still ongoing challenges of social exclusion and negative peer attitudes towards students with disabilities in the school setting. This paper asks if a multifaceted school-based inclusion programme targeting visual disability can improve knowledge, attitudes and behavioural responses? The study evaluates the impact of an awareness and simulation-based inter-group contact intervention on students' knowledge, implicit versus explicit attitudes, and proxies of inclusive behaviour toward individuals with visual impairments.

📊 Data and context
The study was conducted in 3 upper-secondary schools in the province of Trento, Northeast Italy. The sample spans 18 classrooms covering the three main Italian educational tracks: academic, technical, and vocational, involving a total of 344 participating students.

⚙️ Research Design
We use hybrid within-class and between-class randomised controlled trial (RCT) design to maximise statistical power and assess spillovers. In each school two classes are randomly assigned to serve as "pure controls", while in the other 4, students are assigned at individual level to participate in the intervention or not. After the follow-up survey, all students were offered the intervention.

📏 Measures
The study uses a rich set of outcomes, from factual knowledge of visual impairment, to key socio-emotional skills for inclusion (perspective-taking and empathy), explicit and implicit attitudes, and proxies of behaviours measured through incentivised choices following procedures from experimental economics.

🔎 Main findings
The intervention produces large positive effects on factual knowledge regarding visual impairment and empathic concerns. Generalised attitudes improve as well while multidimensional attitudes and implicit biases are not impacted. Moreover, the willingness to interact socially with persons with visual disability and other behavioural outcomes are not affected.

💡 Implications
The evidence suggests that assessing impacts only on knowledge and general attitudes, as is commonly done in the literature, may not suffice to determine the extent to which such interventions can be successful at improving social inclusion for persons with visual or other forms of impairment.

Read the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214804326000959

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

09/07/2026

🤔 Have you ever heard of “paid volunteering”?

Though at first sight this may sound like an oxymoron, it is not uncommon that volunteers receive a small monetary compensation for their services. Such small allowances are claimed to be a channel to motivate people to volunteer.

📈 Countries like Germany have even introduced tax exemptions - and gradually increased generosity of the latter - for volunteer compensation to accommodate this phenomenon. But do these policies achieve their objective of fostering voluntarism? And do the higher payments have broader consequences?

A new WP by Annalisa Tassi and Lieke Voorintholt sheds light exactly on these questions. The authors examine whether increasing tax-free monetary compensation for paid volunteers encourages longer volunteering or affects other forms of prosocial and economic behaviour.

📊 Using microdata from German income tax returns and exploiting a 2013 policy reform that raised the exemption threshold for volunteer compensation, the authors apply a difference-in-differences approach combined with a duration model.

Although highest-paid volunteers are generally less likely to quit volunteering, the findings show no evidence that the higher tax-free compensation increased the length of volunteer service or generated spillover effects on labor income or donations.

💡Based on these results and insights from theory and literature, the authors suggest that non-financial measures may be more effective than increasing monetary compensation in promoting paid volunteering.

Read the full Working Paper: https://irvapp.fbk.eu/publications/detail/the-effects-of-monetary-compensation-on-paid-volunteers-quasi-experimental-evidence-from-germany/

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

02/07/2026

Sergiu Burlacu attended the COMPIE 2026 Conference (COunterfactual Methods for Policy Impact Evaluation), organized by the European Commission's Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation (CC-ME) in collaboration with and hosted by the IÉSEG School of Management, in Paris.

Sergiu presented the paper "GenAI: Substitute or Complement in Evidence Synthesis. A discrete choice experiment with Italian policymakers", one of the scientific outputs of the PolicyAId project: https://irvapp.fbk.eu/projects/detail/policyaid/

COMPIE is a leading conference in the causal inference field, bringing together experts contributing to all sides of the evidence-based policy-making process through rigorous empirical studies, causal inference methodological contributions, and direct policy work: https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/event/compie-2026-conference_en

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

30/06/2026

On Friday, 26 June, Giovanna Scarchilli presented the paper Assessing the French Tax-Benefit System in Italy: A EUROMOD-Based “System Swap” at the Second International Conference on Inequalities and Opportunities, hosted by the University of Bari.

The study is done in collaboration with Sonia Marzadro, Francesco Figari and Carlo Fiorio and proposes a framework for conducting international comparisons of fiscal systems using the EUROMOD infrastructure. Specifically, it applies microsimulation techniques to simulate the full French tax-benefit system on Italian data. The empirical findings suggest that the French system is more redistributive, mainly due to its more generous benefit structure.

Fondazione Bruno Kessler

25/06/2026

At the XLVII AISRe Conference in Florence, Nadia Matsiuk presented
the project “Citizens’ Perceptions of Services and Equity: Hubs, Belts
and Inner Areas in Italy”, developed in collaboration with the
Università di Padova and the Università degli Studi del Molise. Based on an original survey, the study examines how citizens in service hubs and inner areas perceive municipal services.

The findings show that residents of inner areas use in-person services less, partly compensating through online services, and are more critical of how
adequate services are to local needs. The project contributes to
IMPACT, FBK-IRVAPP’s research on inner mountain areas.

Fondazione Bruno Kessler