We study the impact of exogenous variation in Italian municipal elections' voter turnout rates on city performance scores and elected mayors'indicators of valence. First, we build a simple model of voluntary and costly expressive voting, where the relative weight of ideology and valence issues...

Cultural heritage is a complex and elusive concept, constantly evolving through time, and combining cultural, aesthetic, symbolic, spiritual, historical and economic values. The Handbook on the Economics of Cultural Heritage outlines the contribution of economics to the design and analysis of...

We study the impact of exogenous variation in Italian municipal elections'voter turnout rates on city performance scores and elected mayors' indicators of valence. First, we build a simple model of voluntary and costly expressive voting, where the relative weight of ideology and valence issues...

While a vast literature has analysed the wage and employment effects of active labor market programs (ALMPs), a welfare analysis of such programs is seldom implemented (Kluve and Schmidt, 2002). In an attempt to measure the welfare effect of a wage subsidy on youth labor, this paper performs a...

Do citizens engage in comparative performance evaluation across local governments? And if they do, how can we disentangle this behavior from other forms of strategic interactions among local governments or simple spatial correlation across neighboring jurisdictions? We use spatial econometrics...

This paper investigates whether national evaluation of decentralised government performance tends, by lessening local information spill-overs, to reduce the scope for local performance comparisons and consequently to lower the extent of spatial auto-correlation among local government...

This paper investigates the role of economic and political volatility in the process of corporate tax-rate determination. The article is based on a theoretical framework that allows for the ability of multinational firms to choose the optimal timing of foreign investment and to shift profits by...