This paper analyzes the relations between businesses seized from organized crime and the banking system. The first part of the paper examines legislative developments regarding seized and confiscated assets and highlights the persistence of problem areas despite the efforts to create a...

Organized crime is widely regarded as damaging to the economy, to say nothing of people�s lives. Yet little is known about the mechanism at work. This paper helps fill the gap by analyzing the impact of organized crime on the allocation of public subsidies to businesses. We assemble an...

I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their counterfactual economic performance in the absence of organized crime. The synthetic control is a weighted average of other...

We exploit a gravity model to study the main determinants of cross-border financial flows and to identify those flows that appear to be abnormally above the predicted value. Our data include all Italian cross-border bank transfers that took place between 2007 and 2010. We find that, other things...