First-past-the-post elections in single-member districts make legislators more accountable to their district of election compared to proportional electoral systems. Accountability makes politicians more sensitive to voters' preferences when deciding where and how to allocate public expenditure,...

This paper provides a sufficient statistics framework to study the design of optimal targeted social insurance in the presence of manipulation opportunities, through which individuals select into policies not intended for them. We apply our framework to Italian unemployment insurance (UI), which...

We construct measures of firms' beliefs about climate regulation, plans for future abatement, and current actions on emissions mitigation, using Carbon Disclosure Project data. These measures vary significantly around the Paris climate change agreement announcement. A dynamic model of a...

What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that austerity increases tax progressivity. Consistent with this evidence, we find that in a...

What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that austerity increases income tax progressivity. Consistent with this evidence, we find that...