Previous studies on electoral competition show that fiscal variables are manipulated by incumbent politicians in order to be re-elected. This phenomenon has been addressed by the literature on electoral budget cycle and, in a decentralised economy, by the literature on yardstick competition. Our...

We evaluate the effect of relaxing fiscal rules on policy outcomes applying a quasi-experimental research design. In 1999, the Italian central government introduced fiscal rules aimed at imposing fiscal discipline on municipal governments, and in 2001 the rules were relaxed for municipalities...

Between 1997 and 2014, US corn, soybean and cotton production almost fully converted to genetically modified crops. Starting around 2007, improved tight oil and shale gas technologies turned the declining US fossil fuel production into a booming industry. We study the effects of these two...

As with the market for goods and services, democratic competition involves political parties offering their services (policy programs) to citizen-consumers who vote for their preferred partisan supplier. Little is known about the partial effect of a shift in parties' seat shares for given voter...

In this paper we investigate the effect of family connections to politicians on individuals' labor market outcomes. We combine data for Italy over almost three decades from longitudinal social security records on a random sample of around 1 million private sector employees with the universe of...

We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive larger transfers per capita....

This paper uses the Italian income tax treatment of 2006/7 as a quasi-natural tax experiment to offer some fresh empirical evidence on how labour supply responds to exogenous income tax hikes. We adopt the identification strategy based on TWFE panel data Difference-in-Differences (DID) model to...

This work analyses the effect of the two preference voting systems - proportional system with blocked lists of candidates vs proportional system with open list of candidates - on the quality of politicians. The exogenous variation in the Italian Parliament electoral system (Law n. 270/2005) -...

Three sources of strategic tax interactions among local jurisdictions are usually considered in the literature: public expenditure spill-over, tax competition and yardstick competition. However, another source has now been suggested: the intellectual trend. According to that hypothesis,...