Do strong states affect the culture and actions of their citizens in a persistent way? And if so, can the capacity to tax, by itself, have a role in driving this effect? I study how the historical capacity of a state to collect taxes affects the decision of citizens to evade the mandatory...

In this paper I study whether citizens' tax morale (and, more broadly, citizens' attitudes towards the state) can be affected by past institutions, focusing on the role of historical fiscal capacity. Exploiting the features of the tax collection system of a pre-unification state in XIX Century...

We use a panel of Italian manufacturing firms for the period 2001-2014 to analyse the distribution of firm size, and then test for the validity of Gibrat's law using unit root tests. Although Gibrat's Law is rejected and the estimates suggest that small firms grow faster than larger ones, we do...