This paper empirically investigates the impact of populist governments on public policies and finances. We focus on Italian local governments (i.e. municipalities) over the 2010-2019 period, when a populists, i.e. the Five Stars Movement, became the most voted party in the country. We first...

This paper investigates the economic and environmental effects of pay-as-youthrow (PAYT) waste programs. Using a newly constructed longitudinal dataset of Italian municipalities and a staked-by-event design, we obtain three main findings: (i) PAYT programs significantly reduce total waste...

This paper investigates how the job search outcomes of displaced migrants are affected by the labor market outcomes of past co-workers of the same nationality. For this exercise I use matched employer-employee micro data on the universe of private-sector employees in Italy between 1975 and 2001....

We investigate how changes in the salience of a minority group affect the majority group's voting behavior. Specifically, we focus on Muslim communities and their increased salience in daily life during Ramadan. To estimate a causal effect, we exploit exogenous variation in the distance of...

This paper develops a theoretical framework that makes predictions on (a) the conditions under which a populist party decides to run and the policy position it takes and (b) voters' response under different electoral systems. We test these predictions using data on Italian municipal elections...

This paper investigates how voters respond to threats to the nation by estimating the political effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis. To establish causality, I exploit the geographical variation induced by the range of the missiles: only U.S. localities within 1,000 nautical miles from Cuba could...

We use firm closure data from social security records for Austria 1978-1998 to investigate the effect of age on employment prospects. We rely on exact matching to compare workers displaced due to firm closure with similar non-displaced workers. We then use a difference-in- difference strategy to...

We investigate whether the costs of job displacement differ between blue collar and white collar workers. In the short run earnings and employment losses are substantial for both groups but stronger for white collar workes. In the long run, there are only weak effects for blue collar workers but...

We study whether employment prospects of old and young workers differ after a plant closure. Using Austrian administrative data, we show that old and young workers face similar displacement costs in terms of employment in the long-run, but old workers lose considerably more initially and gain...

We infer the role of gender identity norms from the reallocation of childcare across parents, following changes in their relative wages. By exploiting variation from a Swedish tax reform, we estimate the elasticity of substitution in parental childcare for the whole population and for...