Liste di mobilità (LM) is an Italian labour market programme targeted to dismissed workers. There is a "passive" component granting monetary benefits to employees dismissed by firms larger than 15 employees, and an "active" component providing an employment subsidy to any firm hiring workers...

Empirical tests of the theories on the relationship between political competition and economic performance generate a puzzle: data tend to support the theory at the lower levels of government, but not in panels of countries. We argue that the larger set of policy instruments reduces the tax...

The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of crime on FDI inflows in 103 Italian provinces. The incidence of criminality is measured through the number of complaints for different kinds of crime. The analysis has been conducted using different estimation methods for panel data. The...

This paper analyses the relations between the banking system fluctuations, on one hand, and taxation and public spending, on the other one, using a VECM methodology. We find some evidence of prociclicality of fiscal policy using variables such as government spending, taxes, and primary surplus....

This paper investigates the way in which job mobility contributes to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that men experience higher wage growth than women during the first 10 years of their career, and that this difference is particularly large when workers...

In this paper we study top executive turnover in Italian Banks over the period 1993-2001. We relate the probability of survival of top executives (Presidents, CEOs and General Managers) to bank performance and the manager's local connections, controlling for (observable and unobservable) bank...

We analyse the revenue-expenditure patterns of local governments, allowing for asymmetric and non-linear adjustments of local spending and taxation to disequilibrium errors. Our results provide evidence of a downward inflexibility of both local government spending and local taxation, pointing to...

We compare single ballot vs dual ballot elections under plurality rule, assuming sincere voting and allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under the dual ballot, the number of parties is larger but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy is smaller, because their...

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...

Why do people have kids in developed societies? We propose an empirical test of two alternative theories - children as "consumptionʺ vs. "investmentʺ good. We use as a natural experiment the Italian pension reforms of the 90s that introduced a clear discontinuity in the treatment across...