As part of a collective answer to the threat posed by the Great Recession to several Member States' public finances, the European Commission's November 2011 Green Paper discussed the introduction of Stability Bonds (or Eurobonds) that would partially or completely replace the national bonds of...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of political institutions in privatization. The empirical testing relies on a new political database with continuous and time-varying measures of the political-institutional setting, and of the partisan orientation of the executive. Using...

This paper studies the timing of privatization in 21 major developed economies in the 1977-2002 period. Duration analysis shows that political fragmentation plays a significant role in explaining government's decision to privatize: privatization is delayed longer in democracies characterized by...

I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to mafia activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their counterfactual economic performance in the absence of organized crime. The synthetic control is a weighted average of other...

We document a sharp reversal in electoral participation between the North and the South of Italy after the 1912 enfranchisement which extended voting rights from a limited élite to (almost) all adult males. When voting was restricted to the élite, electoral turnout was higher in the South but...

We exploit exogenous variation in legal status following the January 2007 European Union enlargement to estimate its effect on immigrant crime. We difference out unobserved time-varying factors by (i) comparing recidivism rates of immigrants from the "new" and "candidate" member countries; and...

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990-2003. Drawing on police administrative data, we first document that the size of immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of property crimes...

We exploit exogenous variation in legal status following the January 2007 European Union enlargement to estimate its effect on immigrant crime. We difference out unobserved timevarying factors by 1) comparing recidivism rates of immigrants from the “new” and “candidate” member countries...

We examine the empirical relationship between immigration and crime across Italian provinces during the period 1990-2003. Drawing on police administrative records, we first document that the size of the immigrant population is positively correlated with the incidence of property crimes and with...

Interpersonal trust favors the expansion of organizations by allowing the delegation of decisions and tasks among anonymous others or people that interact only infrequently. We document these facts for a representative survey of Italian manufacturing firms and use this source of data to...