In a political agency model, we study the effect of introducing a less transparent tax tool for the financing of local governments. We show that lower quality politicians would use more the less transparent tax tool to enhance their probability of re-election. This prediction is tested by...

A 1999 reform allowed Italian Mayors to partially substitute a more accountable source of tax revenue (the property tax) with a less transparent one (a surcharge on the personal income tax). Theoretical analysis suggests this should give incompetent Mayors a less costly way to hide themselves,...

A 1999 reform allowed Italian Mayors to partially substitute a more accountable source of tax revenue (the property tax) with a less transparent one (a surcharge on the personal income tax). Theoretical analysis suggests this should give incompetent Mayors a less costly way to hide themselves,...

A 1999 reform allowed Italian Mayors to partially substitute a more accountable source of tax revenue (the property tax) with a less trans- parent one (a surcharge on the personal income tax). Theoretical anal- ysis suggests this should give incompetent Mayors a less costly way to hide...

A 1999 reform allowed Italian Mayors to partially substitute a more accountable source of tax revenue (the property tax) with a less transparent one (a surcharge on the personal income tax). Theoretical analysis suggests this should give incompetent Mayors a less costly way to hide themselves,...

A 1999 reform allowed Italian Mayors to partially substitute a more accountable source of tax revenue (the property tax) with a less transparent one (a surcharge on the personal income tax). Theoretical analysis suggests this should give incompetent Mayors a less costly way to hide themselves,...

Las metrópolis, amplias zonas densamente pobladas en las que variados entes territoriales gravitan sobre un núcleo metropolitano, son reconocidas como las formas territoriales dominantes al comando de la economía global y, sin embargo, no gozan de reconocimiento político. Los niveles...

Relying on a unique survey of more than 15,000 respondents conducted from June to August 2020 in Italy, we show that priming religiosity in healthcare workers decreases the level of self‐assessed mental distress experienced during the first wave of the COVID‐19. We show that priming...

We challenge the use of traditional measures of ethnic density

In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to...