We investigate how changes in the salience of a minority group affect the majority group's voting behavior. Specifically, we focus on Muslim communities and their increased salience in daily life during Ramadan. To estimate a causal effect, we exploit exogenous variation in the distance of...

We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the...

This paper develops a theoretical framework that makes predictions on (a) the conditions under which a populist party decides to run and the policy position it takes and (b) voters' response under different electoral systems. We test these predictions using data on Italian municipal elections...

This paper investigates how voters respond to threats to the nation by estimating the political effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis. To establish causality, I exploit the geographical variation induced by the range of the missiles: only U.S. localities within 1,000 nautical miles from Cuba could...

In this paper we analyse several measures which are typically included in a social security reform: a cut in the social security benefits, an increase in the social security tax and tax incentives for the purchase of private life annuities, which have recently become quite popular at the...

This paper investigates the effect of adverse selection on the private annuity market in a model with two periods of retirement. In order to introduce the existence of limited-time pension insurance, we assume that for each period of retirement separate contracts can be purchased. Demand for the...

This paper investigates the effect of adverse selection and price competition on the private annuity market in a model with two retirement periods. In this framework annuity companies can offer contracts with different payoffs over the periods of retirement. Varying the time structure of the...

This paper includes couples on the demand side and analyses their implications on the problem of adverse selection in the annuity market. First, we examine the pooling equilibrium for individual-life annuities and show that in the presence of couples the rate of return on individuallife...

We study learning in a decentralized pairwise adverse selection economy, where buyers have access to the quality of traded goods but not to the quality of non- traded goods. Buyers categorize ask prices in order to predict quality as a function of ask price. The categorization is endogenously...

We present a model in which the media provide voters with information that is tainted by their own preferences, and derive an equilibrium in which media endorsements influence voting behavior. Competition for media endorsement causes political parties to adopt more centrist policies, which...