This paper sketches a theory of the secular decline in morbidity and mortality that takes account of changes in human physiology since 1700. The synergism between technological and physiological improvements has produced a form of human evolution, much more rapid than natural selection, which is...

The 19th century economist, Thomas Robert Malthus, hypothesized that the long-run supply of labor is completely elastic at a fixed wage-income level because population growth tends to outstrip real output growth. Dynamic equilibrium with constant income and population is achieved through...

A recent endogenous growth literature has focused on the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages were linked to factor endowments, to one where modern growth has broken that link. In this paper we present evidence on another, related phenomenon: the dramatic reversal in...

This paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential Malthusian theory, according to which improvements in the technological environment during the pre-industrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita, eventually leading to a larger, but not significantly richer,...

We study the extent to which ML techniques can be used to improve tax auditing efficiency using administrative data, without the need of randomized audits. Using Italy's population data on sole proprietorship tax returns, audits and their outcome, we develop a new approach to address the so...

Adequate wages are an important tool to shield public officials from special interests and corruption. But what is the equilibrium effect of higher wages in the presence of criminal pressure groups, who use both bribes and violence? By means of a regression discontinuity design, we show that an...

The provision of long-term care (LTC) for senior citizens in Italy is at the center of the recent policy debate. Italy has witnessed a spectacular increase in the share of people aged 65 and over and in particular of people aged 80 and over, which could translate in large increases in the number...

We use panel data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth from 1991 to 2016 to document empirically what components of the household budget constraint change in response to shocks to household labor income, both over shorter and over longer horizons. We show that shocks to labor...

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data -...

To identify the effect of social capital on financial development, we exploit the well-known differences in social capital and trust (Banfield (1958), Putnam (1993)) across different parts of Italy, using microeconomic data on households and firms. In areas of the country with high levels of...