Using historical data, we test the validity of Wagner's law of increasing state activity at different stages of economic development for five industrialized European countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy. In order to investigate the coherence between Wagner's law and...

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...

I gruppi dominanti mostrarono prudenza e lungimiranza principalmente quando percepirono la gravità delle situazioni e quei pericoli come incombenti e rovinosi per l’ordine sociale. Anche i rimedi più efficaci furono quelli dettati in prevalenza dai rischi d’instabilità finanziaria e di...

The paper focuses on the role played by state-owned enterprise in the energy history and policy in Italy. A fundamental issue of the economic history of the country is if and how scarcity of raw materials, and particularly of primary energy sources, affected its modern economic growth. As...

This paper revisits, modifies, and combines elements of three major ‘institutional’ international-trade models, none of which has yet fully received the attention that it deserves, to provide a new explanation for the growth, decline, and then rebirth of internationally-oriented fairs in the...

The basic thesis of this article is that the essential origins of the modern ‘financial revolution’ were the late-medieval responses, civic and mercantile, to financial impediments from both Church and State, concerning the usury doctrine, that reached their harmful fruition in the later...

We study how cultural distance affects the rejection of imposed institutions. To this purpose, we exploit the transplantation of Piedmontese institutions on Southern Italy which occurred during the Italian unification. We assemble a novel and unique dataset containing information on episodes of...

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...