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Wednesday, 24 June, 2026

Master´s Thesis Defense Presentations June 2026

Defense Committee: Teresa Freitas-Monteiro, Jan Zápal, Yiman Sun

9:00

Blend Berisha: How Wartime Violence Shapes Post-Conflict Voting: The Electoral Legacy of War in Kosovo

10:00

Boris Gerát: Risk Channel of Monetary Policy and Heterogeneity in the Financial Sector

11:00

Rebeka Hoblik: Priming Protectionism: 19th Century Tariff Exposure and the Shape of Public Discourse in Newspapers

13:00

Maggi Cardoso Giovana: Financial Incentives and Sustainable Mobility: Evaluating the Impact of the Ecobonus Program in Italy

14:00:

Petr Rusnok: Why ICT Matters Less in Europe: Financial Structure and Organizational Investment

15:00

González Munoz René Sebastian: Intertemporal consistency and performance in project realization outcomes

Maggi Cardoso Giovana

Abstract:

This thesis evaluates the impact of the Italian Ecobonus program (a purchase subsidy for low- and zero-emission vehicles introduced in 2019) on eco-vehicle adoption, using national, regional, and international evidence. The national difference-in-differences analysis estimates that the program is associated with approximately 209,000 additional eco-vehicle registrations per year relative to petrol vehicles, a result stable across five specifications and supported by an event study that does not reject parallel pre-trends. The implied cumulative effect over 2019–2024 is approximately 1.26 million additional registrations. The regional analysis estimates that eco-vehicle market share increased by approximately 26 percentage points across Italian regions after 2019, with the increase visible in all 20 regions, though pre-existing regional heterogeneity precludes a causal interpretation of this estimate. The international analysis does not detect a significant average treatment effect in static specifications; TWFE event-study estimates suggest gradual positive dynamics, but cohort-specific estimators following Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) find near-zero average treatment effects throughout the event window. This divergence is a key methodological finding: it indicates that standard TWFE estimates are substantially biased in this staggered adoption setting, and that the post-treatment dynamics visible in the TWFE event study likely reflect cohort heterogeneity rather than a causal average effect of subsidies. Italy’s adoption path broadly tracks the European average rather than diverging from it, consistent with the interpretation that the transition to eco vehicles is driven by common technological and regulatory forces, and that national subsidies contributed at the margin but were not the primary driver of the observed shift. Overall, the findings suggest that financial incentives may contribute to eco-vehicle adoption, though their effectiveness depends on broader market conditions and pre-existing adoption trends.

Full Text: “Financial Incentives and Sustainable Mobility: Evaluating the Impact of the Ecobonus Program in Italy"