We quantify the private returns and social costs of political connections exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset that combines matched employer-employee data for a representative sample of Italian firms with administrative archives on the universe of individuals appointed in local governments...

The Bank of Italy quarterly econometric model (BIQM) is a large-scale ‘semi structural' macro-econometric model. It tries to strike the right balance between theoretical rigour and statistical fit to the data. This paper provides an update of the features and the properties of the model,...