This paper studies how fiscal decentralization affects local services. It explores a 1993 reform that increased the fiscal autonomy of Italian municipalities by replacing government transfers with revenues from a local property tax. Our identification leverages cross-municipal variation in the...

A poor risk culture was one cause of the financial crisis. Surprisingly, there is no evidence of the link between risk culture and bank stability. Using a large sample of European banks from 2004 to 2014, our paper shows that a sound risk culture leads to better performance. Our research design...

This paper studies the effects of university STEM education on innovation and labor market outcomes by exploiting a change in enrollment requirements in Italian STEM majors. University-level scientific education had two direct effects on the development of patents by students who had acquired a...

In the last three decades, the wages of older workers in many high-income countries grew at a much faster rate than the wages of younger workers. This paper uses extensive administrative data from Italy and Germany to provide an analysis of this age wage gap. First, the widening of the age wage...

This paper studies career spillovers across workers, which arise in firms with limited promotion opportunities. We exploit a 2011 Italian pension reform that unexpectedly tightened eligibility criteria for the public pension, leading to sudden, substantial, and heterogeneous retirement delays....

The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) was the largest aid transfer in history. This paper estimates its effects on Italy's postwar local economic development. It exploits plausibly exogenous differences between Italian provinces in the value of reconstruction grants they received. Provinces that could...

Bianchi and Giorcelli (2022) study the long-term and spillover effects of a management intervention program on firm performance in the US, between 1940 and 1945. The authors find that the Training Within Industry (TWI) program led to positive effects which lasted for at least 10 years. Firm...