Cultural traits shape both the scope and the consequences of government intervention. Failing to account for cultural differences may therefore bias the estimated effects of regulation. This paper investigates the direction and the magnitude of this bias, from both a theoretical and an empirical...

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990-2003. Drawing on police data, we first document that the size of the immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of property crimes and with the...

We quantify the private returns and social costs of political connections exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset that combines matched employer-employee data for a representative sample of Italian firms with administrative archives on the universe of individuals appointed in local governments...

We estimate the causal effect of immigrants' legal status on criminal behavior exploiting exogenous variation in migration restrictions across nationalities driven by the last round of the European Union enlargement. Unique individual-level data on a collective clemency bill enacted in Italy...

I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their counterfactual economic performance in the absence of organized crime. The synthetic control is a weighted average of other...

This paper studies the timing of privatization in 21 major developed economies in the 1977-2002 period. Duration analysis shows that political fragmentation plays a significant role in explaining government's decision to privatize: privatization is delayed longer in democracies characterized by...

We survey the existing work on the cross-country differences in the transmission of European monetary policy. We find that prior work, focusing on macroeconomic data, does not clearly answer the question posed in the title and offer some explanations for the ambiguity. Aside from the...

The full insurance hypothesis states that shocks to the firm's performance do not affect workers' compensation. In principal-agent models withmoral hazard, firms trade off insurance and incentives to induce workers to supply the optimal level of effort. We use a long panel of matched...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to buy a risky asset. We relate this measure to a set of consumers� decisions that in theory should vary with attitude towards risk. We find that...

We investigate the role of information spillovers (IS) in determining firms' labor adjustments. We test the proposition that information on relevant state variables spills over through one firm's decision to those of other firms, assuming that spillovers matter only among firms that are both...