This paper exploits the available empirical evidence in order to shed light on the take-o. of temporary employment in Italy. This kind of non-standard employment was recently legalized by the law 196/1997. The national data set of “Manpower” -one of the leading agencies in the Italian...

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates’ attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters’ types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale...

We analyze political selection in a closed list proportional system where parties have strong gate-keeping power, which they use as an instrument to pursue votes. Parties face a trade-off between selecting loyal candidates or experts, who are highly valued by the voters and thus increase the...

We use a transparent statistical methodology for data-driven case studies–the synthetic control method–to investigate the impact of economic liberalization on real GDP per capita in a worldwide sample of countries. Economic liberalization is measured by a widely used indicator that captures...

This paper evaluates the effects of changes in the supply of news provided by newspapers on electoral participation, political selection, and government efficiency. We address these issues in the Italian context by constructing a new dataset covering the presence of local news by different types...

We analyze political selection in a closed list proportional system where parties have strong gate-keeping power, which they use as an instrument to pursue votes. Parties face a trade-off between selecting loyal candidates or experts, who are highly valued by the voters and thus increase the...

The diffusion of Temporary Work Agency (TWA) jobs originated a harsh policy debate and ambiguous empirical evidence. Results for the US, based on quasi-experimental evidence, suggest that a TWA assignment decreases the probability of finding a stable job, while results for Europe, based on the...

Theory predicts that the majoritarian electoral system should produce more targeted redistribution and lower rents than proportional representation. We test these predictions using data on the Italian House of Representatives, and address the nonrandom selection into different systems exploiting...

This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidates. The data refer to Brazil, where federal...