This paper investigates the effects of immigration quotas on the average quality of immigrants by developing a human capital migration model where efficiency in migration depends on skills and emigration rates are higher among skilled workers. Studying the joint determination of the domestic...

To study the political economy of immigration, we develop a common agency model where a trade union and a lobby of entrepreneurs offer contributions to the government to influence its decision on how many immigrants can enter the domestic economy. In the political equilibrium, anticipating that...

In this paper we perform an empirical analysis to investigate the impact of socio-economic heterogeneity on electoral turnout. We exploit a unique dataset on local elections in an Italian municipality, which merges information on socio-economic characteristics of about 370.000 individuals with...

This paper develops a model of endogenous growth with overlapping generations to investigate the joint determination of social security, public investment and growth in a small open economy. We argue that a pure pay-as-you-go system provides the taxpayers with the incentives to support...

In this paper, we show that the positive estimated coefficient of average social security expenditure, often detected in cross-country growt regression, can not be imputed to reverse causation, that is on economic growth pulling social security expenditure, nor to omitted variables or other...

In this paper we develop an endogenous growth model of open economies, where countries differ with respect to the quality of property rights. Within this context, we analyze two types of reforms. First, we look at growth and welfare effects of removing capital controls, given the degree of...