We study the political consequences of a major land reform in Italy, which split large estates and transferred land to small owners. Using a panel spatial regression discontinuity design, we show that the reform benefited the incumbent Christian Democrat party. The electoral benefits persist for...

Political upheaval, with the dangerous rise of the far right - in Italy and Europe - is likely to be stabilised when politics and policies again turn their attention to the priorities of the majority of impoverished voters, with a focus on reducing inequalities, unemployment and casualisation.

This paper studies how heterogeneity in income dynamics affects the POUM hypothesis (the idea that poor people do not support high level of redistribution because they hope to be rich in the future). We consider a setting where individuals evaluate their expected future income using both their...