We develop a political economy model of Schumpeterian growth with entry where excessive red tape and bureaucracy are used strategically by the incumbent politician to acquire incumbency advantage. By setting sufficiently high red tape, the politician induces the monopolist to invest in...

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...

We use a political economy model of Schumpeterian growth with entry to investigate how an incumbent politician can strategically use the level of red tape to acquire incumbency advantage. By setting sufficiently high red tape, the politician induces the incumbent firm in the intermediate sector...

We exploit a unique dataset merging data on individual socio-economic characteristics and political participation in an Italian municipality to investigate the relationship between ethnic diversity in residential neighborhoods and individuals' propensity to vote. We document a sizable negative...

This paper associates political instability to real shocks affecting the income of the median voter, in a two-period model where two political parties set redistribution in order to defend the interests of well-de¯ned constituencies. Implemented policies affect future voting outcomes and an...

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...

We model an OLG economy where productivity growth comes from two alternative sources: process innovation and learning-by-doing. There is a trade-off between the two in so far as frequent technological updates reduce the scope for learning on existing technologies. A conflict is shown to arise...