In 2007 the Italian central government started a program by transferring funds to regional governments to develop both private and public early childcare services. Exploiting the different timing of program implementation across regions, we evaluate its effectiveness in boosting the public...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the risk of participating in public events, among them elections. We assess whether the voter turnout in the 2020 local government elections in Italy was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by exploiting the variation among municipalities in the...

We study how unemployment benefit eligibility affects the layoff exit rate by exploiting quasi-experimental variation in eligibility rules in Italy. By using a difference-indifferences estimator, we find an instantaneous increase of about 12% in the layoff probability when unemployment benefit...