What is the impact of organised crime on the allocation of public resources and on tax collection? This paper studies the consequences of collusion between members of criminal organisations and politicians in Italian local governments. In order to capture the presence of organised crime, we...

In the past years, a large number of evaluations have assessed the impact of European Union's Cohesion Policy, the largest transnational programme for regional development promotion worldwide. In particular, great attention has been devoted to determine the effectiveness of EU funds in improving...

Internet and near-instant communication services have had a strong impact on the way people communicate and exchange information since the end of the 1990s. The COVID-19 pandemic shock is likely to provide a dramatic boost to this phenomenon. In the world that will emerge from lockdown, digital...

The availability of public education services can influence residential choices. Hence, policies aiming to `rationalise' service provision by reducing the number of undersized nodes in the public school network can lead to population decline, especially in spatially isolated areas lacking valid...