We provide a theoretical and empirical assessment of why local fiscal autonomy can affect the skills of elected officials in sub-national governments. We first develop a model of politics with different types of politicians and show that -- following a tax decentralization reform increasing...

We study the effect of the COVID-19 economic lockdown on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by...