The recent ascent of right-wing populist movements in many countries has rekindled interest in understanding the causes of the rise of Fascism in inter-war years. In this paper, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of support for the Socialist Party after World War I (WWI) and...

We document that the spread of the Mafia in Sicily at the end of the 19th century was in part shaped by the rise of socialist Peasant Fasci organizations. In an environment with weak state presence, this socialist threat triggered landholders, estate managers and local politicians to turn to the...

We document that the spread of the Mafia in Sicily at the end of the 19th century was in part shaped by the rise of socialist Peasant Fasci organizations. In an environment with weak state presence, this socialist threat triggered landholders, estate managers and local politicians to turn to the...

We document that the spread of the Mafia in Sicily at the end of the 19th century was in part shaped by the rise of socialist Peasant Fasci organizations. In an environment with weak state presence, this socialist threat triggered landholders, estate managers and local politicians to turn to the...

We study the impact of organized crime on electoral competition. In a theoretical model where parties compete for mafia support, we show that (i) the strongest party is willing to pay the highest price to secure mafia services; (ii) the volume of electoral trade with the mafia increases with...

The recent ascent of right-wing populist movements in many countries has rekindled interest in understanding the causes of the rise of Fascism in inter-war years. In this paper, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of support for the Socialist Party after World War I (WWI) and...

Higher electoral competition reinforces the position of special interest groups, which can endorse politicians in exchange for the support of specific policies. This paper formalizes this intuition and test it on Italian electoral data, using the 1991 electoral reform as an exogenous source of...

We investigate competition for FDI within a region when a foreign multinational firm can profitably exploit differences in statutory corporate tax rates by shifting taxable profits to lower-tax jurisdictions. In such framework we show that targeted tax competition may lead to higher welfare for...

In this paper we investigate tax/subsidy competition for FDI between countries of different size when a domestic firm is the incumbent in the largest market. We investigate how the nature (public or private) of the incumbent firm affects policy competition between the two governments seeking to...

This paper applies the framework of endogenous timing in games to mixed quantity duopoly, wherein a private – domestic or foreign – firm competes with a public, welfare maximizing firm. We show that simultaneous play never emerges as a subgame-perfect equilibrium of the extended game, in...