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 to investigate the dynamics of the per capita GDP over the period 1961-1997 for the Spanish provinces. To avoid issues linked to the cross-sectional regression and the time series approaches, a non-parametric density estimation approach is instead used. The main goal...