In this paper, we estimate price and income semi-elasticities of the length of stay at different destinations in Italy using the 'Multipurpose survey on tourism demand, holidays and trips' provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). We derive the conditional demand function for the length of stay, which depends on tourists' socio-demographic characteristics, travel characteristics, income and price of touristic services. Since income was not reported in our database, we use the propensity score matching to retrieve this information from the 'Survey on household income and wealth (SHIW)', and we use quantile regression to account for the multimodality of the length of stay.

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This paper investigates changes in health behaviours upon retirement, using data drawn from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe. By exploiting changes in eligibility rules for early and statutory retirement, we identify the causal effect of retiring from work on smoking, alcohol drinking, engagement in physical activity and visits to the general practitioner or specialist. We provide evidence about individual heterogeneous effects related to gender, education, net wealth, early-life conditions and job characteristics. Our main results--obtained using fixed-effect two-stage least squares--show that changes in health behaviours occur upon retirement and may be a key mechanism through which the latter affects health. In particular, the probability of not practicing any physical activity decreases significantly after retirement, and this effect is stronger for individuals with higher education. We also find that different frameworks of European health care systems (i.e. countries with or without a gate-keeping system to regulate the access to specialist services) matter in shaping individuals' health behaviours after retirement. Our findings provide important information for the design of policies aiming to promote healthy lifestyles in later life, by identifying those who are potential target individuals and which factors may affect their behaviour. Our results also suggest the importance of policies promoting healthy lifestyles well before the end of the working life in order to anticipate the benefits deriving from individuals' health investments.

Abstract. The recent common feeling about a skyrocketing economic risk has drawn increasing attention to its role and consequences on individuals' welfare. In literature one of the concepts that aims to measure it is vulnerability to poverty, that is the probability, today, of being in poverty or to fall into deeper poverty in the future (The World Bank, 2011). This paper compares empirically the several measures of individual vulnerability proposed in the literature, in order to understand which is the best signal of poverty that can be used for policies purposes. To this aim the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, the Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients are used as precision criteria. The results show that two groups of indexes can be identified, high-and low-performers, and, among the former, that proposed by Dutta et al. (2011) is the most precise.

Summary This paper deals with panel cooperation in a cross-national, fully harmonized face-to-face survey. Our outcome of interest is panel cooperation in the fourth wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Following a multilevel approach, we focus on the contribution of paradata at three different levels: fieldwork strategies at the survey agency level, features of the (current) interviewer and paradata describing respondent interview experience from the previous wave. Our results highlight the importance of respondent’s prior interview experience, and of interviewer’s quality of work and experience. We also find that survey agency practice matters: daily communication between fieldwork coordinators and interviewers is positively associated with panel cooperation.