We study the effect of economic insecurity on electoral outcomes using data on municipal elections in Italy. We implement a difference-in-differences approach that exploits exogenous variation across municipalities in the share of inactive workers due to the economic lockdown introduced by the...

Under what conditions can legacies of past violence shape political behaviour? We propose a theory of how war victimization defines attitudes over the long run, and how these can be activated by changes in the political environment. We argue that exposure to violence by members of a different...

Using matched employer-employee data for Italy and newly available information on sick leaves certificates, we study the effect of an exogenous increase in the length of the residual work horizon - triggered by a pension reform that increased minimum retirement age - on middle-aged employees'...

The digitalization of transaction processes through tools such as electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) aims to improve tax compliance and reduce administrative costs. Another important aspect of digitalization is its potential to reduce tax evasion. We analyze the impact of the widely introduced...

This paper studies whether and how religious leaders affect politics. Focusing on Italian dioceses in the period from 1948 to 1992, we find that the identity of the bishop in office explains a significant amount of the variation in the vote share for the Christian Democracy party (DC). This...

This paper investigates the relationship between the spatial distribution of occupations with a high content of peer interactions and wages among Italian provinces. At this aim, we use a unique employer-employee dataset obtained by merging administrative data on wages and labor market histories...

Brain drain is a growing concern for many countries experiencing large emigration rates of their highly educated citizens. While several European countries have designed preferential tax schemes to attract high-skilled individuals, there is limited empirical evidence on the effectiveness of...

We analyse Italy's growth pattern from 2001 to 2019 using the demand and growth regime categories proposed in the post-Keynesian tradition and recently adopted in the comparative political economy (CPE) literature. We argue that Italy followed an export-led recovery strategy after the Global...

We analyse Italy's growth pattern from 2001 to 2019 using the demand and growth regime categories proposed in the post-Keynesian tradition and recently adopted in the comparative political economy (CPE) literature. We argue that Italy followed an export-led recovery strategy after the Global...

In summer 1923, pursuant to the 'full powers' granted him by the Parliament to balance the budget, Alberto De Stefani - appointed in October 1922 as Mussolini's Treasury Minister - announced the abolition of inheritance tax. The most iconic act of Fascist 'financial restauration' of 1922-25, the...

The aim of the study has been to understand the stakeholders' stance, with respect to the different stages of Porter's value chain, to learn what activities could create the most value to the future competitiveness of the Italian aromatic sector. The main challenges faced by stakeholders and...

Once in office, politicians propose policies and programmes aimed at winning the support of their constituencies. While this form of political activism increases with the number of politicians in government, it can also clash with capacity constraints, leading to a congestion effect whereby...

We explore the long run socio-economic impact of a medieval urban governance setting , the king-owned towns (KOTs). For a town the KOT status implies special fiscal, commercial and administrative prerogatives between the community and the Crown, where such as status could be renovated, modified...

I investigate consumption patterns in Italy and use a PCA-biplot to discover a consumption puzzle for the elderly poor. Data from the third wave (2017) of the Eurosystem's Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) indicate that Italian poor old-aged households boast lower levels of the...

We investigate consumption patterns in Europe with supervised machine learning methods and reveal differences in age and wealth impact across countries. Using data from the third wave (2017) of the Eurosystem's Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), we assess how age and (liquid)...

Can past wartime experiences other than violence have long-term effects on political attitudes and behaviours? How are these legacies sustained across generations and beyond those who directly experienced war? We explore these questions in Italy, a country whose democratic institutions were...

We still have limited knowledge about the long-term effects of fascism on European democracies. European countries experienced cycles of violence between the 1960s and 1980s. Can such violence be explained by legacies of mobilization during fascism? We study whether and how the Italian fascist...