We examine the impact of household mortgages on house prices. Using biannual data on Italian cities for the years 2003-2015, we build an exogenous and fully data-driven indicator of mortgage supply stances and use it as an instrument for actual extended mortgages. Our results indicate that...

EU regional policies aim to push regions into self-sustaining growth. Successful interventions would imply a higher growth rate, not only during the treatment (when the region benefits from the transfers), but also after the expiry of the program (when the financing terminates). We investigate...

The paper estimates the effects on the real economy of the sharp reduction in the supply of credit following the 2008 financial crisis. We develop a measure of local credit supply that is based on the market shares of the banks that serve a local economy and the national change in each bank's...

Using different data sources from local labour markets (LLMs) in Italy between 1971 and 2011, we document a number of stylized facts: a) local differences in the ratios of private employment to population are highly persistent; b) the population has a limited reaction to labour demand shocks,...

The paper investigates the effect of electoral rules on voter turnout. It focuses on Italian municipalities, where voting schemes are differentiated by the size of the city: a single ballot system applies to municipalities with less than 15,000 inhabitants, while a dual ballot system is in place...

In this paper we examine whether and how the inflow of female immigrants who “specialize” in household production affects the labor supply of Italian women. To identify the causal effect, we exploit the family reunification motive and the network effects - i.e. the tendency of newly arriving...

We examine the impact of natural disasters on GDP per capita by applying the synthetic control approach. Our analysis encompasses two large-scale earthquakes that occurred in two different Italian regions in 1976 and 1980. We show that the short-term effects are negligible in both regions,...

We examine intergenerational mobility in the very long run, across generations that are six centuries apart. We exploit a unique dataset containing detailed information at the individual level for all people living in the Italian city of Florence in 1427. These individuals have been associated,...

The relationship between inequality and trust has attracted the interest of many scholars who have found a negative relationship between the two variables. However, the causal link from inequality to trust is far from being identified and the existing empirical evidence admittedly remains weak,...

Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon and encouraging tax compliance is an important and much debated policy issue. Many studies have shown that tax cheating has to be attributed to a considerable extent to the tax morale of taxpayers. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the...