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 twofold. First, we study the allocation of European Union (EU) expenditure in Research and Development (R&D) across European regions. Second, we focus on the effects of this variable on regional per capita GDP levels, and on regional growth rates. Using...

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...

This paper studies the impact of education on criminal activity in Italy. We propose a theoretical framework to determine the effects of education and past incidence of crime on criminal activity, and we test its predictions using annual data for the twenty Italian regions over the period...

This paper shows that the widely used log-linearization of the neoclassical model of growth implies a relevant loss in terms of the ability of the model in replicating the patterns of convergence of an economy to its equilibrium level.

This paper studies the dynamics of convergence and divergence in Spain over the period 1965-1995. We analyse the evolution of the per capita income distribution across Spanish provinces and estimate the effects on this evolution of factors such as private, human and public capital, and an...