This paper investigates the causal effect of public administration efficiency on firm-level productivity. To this purpose, we combine newly available data from Italy on public administration efficiency of subnational governments with geo-localised firm-level data for the years 2004-2014. Italy...

Raising the effectiveness of Italy’s public sector is more urgent than ever. It will be key to revive investment and productivity and improve access to quality public services for the most vulnerable. The quality of public goods and services is variable, weakening Italy’s resilience to...

Rather than stabilising aggregate demand, discretionary fiscal policy tends to amplify cyclical fluctuations of output. The commonly accepted reasons are political economy and uncertainty. In the EU, the pro-cyclical nature of discretionary fiscal policy has also been associated with the...

Do politics matter for macroprudential policy? I show that changes to macroprudential regulation exhibit a predictable electoral cycle in the run-up to 221 elections across 58 countries from 2000 through 2014. Policies restricting mortgages and consumer credit are systematically less likely to...

Russia is a federation of more than 80 regions spanning across a huge territory. Natural resource endowment, inherited industrial specialization, remoteness and climate conditions contribute to large regional disparities. This paper presents an empirical framework model for assessing...