Redistribution at the Local Level: The Case of Public Childcare in Italy

We study attitude towards redistribution by local policy-makers in the context of public childcare in Italy. Within a substantially ho- mogeneous legislative framework, different municipalities autonomously define how participation fees vary with a compound indicator of in- come and wealth (ISEE), thus redistributing resources across house- holds using the service. The nearly one hundred municipalities we take into account exhibit wide heterogeneity in redistributive atti-tudes. We find statistically significant correlations with a number of individual characteristics of policy-makers and municipalities, but not with those of the ex-ante distribution of income, which should be cen- tral according to both normative and positive theory. Since the price of public childcare is subsidized, resources are also redistributed from tax-payers to users. The evidence we find is consistent with the hy-pothesis that this type of redistribution is a public good