This paper evaluates the effects of changes in the supply of news provided by newspapers on electoral participation, political selection, and government efficiency. We address these issues in the Italian context by constructing a new dataset covering the presence of local news by different types...

We investigate how the functioning of public procurement is affected by the time politicians have stayed in office. We match a data set on public procurement auctions by Italian municipalities to a data set on the politics of municipal governments. For each municipality, we relate the mayor's...

There is wide consensus that social capital increases government performance. However, the very mechanism underlying the relationship between social capital and well-performing governments remains unclear. In this paper we focus on the budgetary composition of local governments and find that the...

This short paper is fundamentally a reflection on the subject, a medium size Italian municipality, that one of Terni, with about 110.000 inhabitants (number rather stable from 2000), about 1.000 employees and a budget (2008) of €370 million. This municipality has 3 fully owned corporations,...

Since 1991, the Italian national government can dissolve municipal councils when infiltration by organized crime is suspected (Law 164/1991). We exploit variation over time and space in the application of this law to study voters' responses to politicians' publicly exposed ties to criminal...