For a panel of 122 cities observed over 300 years in medieval northern-central Italy, we document that the occurrence of an earthquake retarded institutional transition from the feudal regime to the commune (free city state) in cities where the political and the religious leaders were one and...

In response to the Covid-19 outbreak, among other previous "non-pharmaceutical interven-tions", on March 22, 2020 the Italian Government imposed an economic lockdown and ordered the closing of all non-essential economic activities. This paper estimates the causal effect of this measure on...

We provide evidence about voters’ response to crime control policies. We exploit a natural experiment arising from the Italian 2006 collective pardon releasing about one third of the prison population. The pardon created idiosyncratic incentives to recidivate across released individuals and...

In this paper, we study how the birth of the first universities in Italy affected the emergence of the Italian free cities-states (the commune) in the period 1000-1300 a.d. Exploiting a panel dataset of 121 cities, we show that after the foundation of a new university the distance between each...

We study voters’ response to public policies. We exploit a natural experiment arising from the Italian 2006 collective pardon that created idiosyncratic incentives to recidivate across released individuals and municipalities. We show that municipalities where resident pardoned individuals had...

In response to the Covid-19 outbreak the Italian Government imposed an economic lockdown on March 22, 2020 and ordered the closing of all non-essential economic activities. This paper estimates the causal effects of this measure on mortality by Covid-19 and on mobility patterns. The...