How do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? We extend a Schumpeterian growth model with political connections that help firms ease their bureaucratic and regulatory burden. The model highlights how political connections influence an economy's business...

In today’s tumultuous and fast-changing times, digitalisation and technology are game changers for a wide range of sectors and have a tremendous impact on infrastructure in particular. Roads, railways, electricity grids, aviation and maritime transport are deeply affected by the digital and...

In most Euro Area countries, fiscal and inflation dynamics arise from the history of recurrent monetary and fiscal dominance regimes. We consider France and Italy as illustrative cases for revising price and debt relationship (1955-2019 and 1950-2019, respectively) and estimate a Dynamic...

This paper aims at empirically testing the dynamics of budget outcomes of Italian municipalities in the aftermath of floods, by accounting for heterogeneous levels of resilience and vulnerability to natural disasters. Our findings, based on a dynamic difference-in-difference after propensity...

The paper estimates the political connection premium for Italian cities tracked during the second half of the 1900s, when the role of the state in the economy was very widespread. It leverages the peculiar features of the gridlocked political landscape in place between the end of World War II...

Population ageing is prompting governments around the world to increase the retirement age. However, not all workers may be equally able to extend their working lives as they may face adverse health consequences. In this article, we examine the health and labour market effects of an Italian...

Does variation in soldiers’ accountability explain civilian victimization in armed conflicts? We answerthis question by studying the Italian Campaign inWorldWar II (July 1943 - May 1945). We leverageplausibly exogenous variation in the movement of 32 front lines that negatively shocked the...

In this work we are going to explore how to evaluate the cost risk related to the market-based ancillary services procurement by an electricity Transmission System Operator (TSO). Firstly the notion of Cost-at-Risk (CaR) is defined in the context of the dispatching market. Secondly, we are...

In July 2007, the Prodi government and representatives of the three main Italian trade union confederations signed a landmark agreement on welfare and economic development. In October, in order to ratify or reject the agreement, the Italian labor movement organized a referendum, i.e. the...

Individual absolute risk aversion is measured for a sample of 1373 male household heads, using the 1995 wave of the Survey on the Income and Wealth of Italian households. This measure, conditional on financial and real wealth and household income, is used as an instrument for attained education...