Based on the Calciopoli scandal, which uncovered widespread corruption in Italian football, this paper quantifies the effect of referee bias on the performance of football teams. The impartiality of referees is often distorted by external factors which exert some emotional pressure in order to...

Using a conviction-based measure, we find that local (state-level) public corruption exerts a negative effect on the lending activity of US banks. Our baseline estimations show that the difference in public corruption between, e.g., Alabama, where corruption is high, and Minnesota, where...

Why high levels of market liberalization can be supported by both repressive and liberal political regimes? Drawing from Acemoglu and Robinson (2006), we use a large dataset of world economies and document the existence of a U-shaped relationship between political and economic liberalization....

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we study the allocation of European Union (EU) expenditure in Research and Development (R&D) across European regions. Second, we focus on the effects of this variable on regional per capita GDP levels, and on regional growth rates. Using...