Using declassified Federal Bureau of Narcotics records on 800 US Mafia members active in the 1950s and 1960s, and on their connections within the organized crime network, I estimate network effects on gangsters' economic status. Lacking information on criminal proceeds, I measure economic status...

I examine the relationship between organized crime, violence and the quality of the political class in Italy. I show that mafia-affected regions exhibit abnormal spikes in the homicide rate during the electoral periods, relative to other regions. Greater violence before the elections is in turn...

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...