This paper estimates the causal effect of easing access to divorce on domestic violence. We study two legislative reforms in Italy that sharply cut the monetary costs and mandatory waiting periods for divorce, triggering a large and heterogeneous rise in divorce rates nationwide. We combine administrative data on the universe of divorces with a novel dataset on femicides, and we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in municipalities’ exposure to the reforms, arising from municipalities’ age composition interacted with national age-specific divorce rates. We find that easier access to divorce increases the probability of femicide, an effect primarily driven by domestic cases. We also find a reduction in measures typically associated with non-lethal domestic violence, indicating that lethal and non-lethal violence need not respond in the same way to an improvement in women’s outside options.

Does electing a female political leader fuel a far-right backlash? Using a regression discontinuity design on close mixed-gender mayoral races in Italian municipalities, we find that electing a female mayor raises the vote share of Lega—Italy’s main populist radical right party—by 2.0 percentage points at the next general election, nearly doubling the average change. To investigate the mechanisms, we construct novel municipal-level indices of masculinity norms and gender norms, and show that the reaction is concentrated where dominance-oriented masculinity norms are stronger and is further amplified by local economic insecurity, while exhibiting no clear gradient along gender norms. This pattern is consistent with a status-threat mechanism. The results provide causal evidence that advances in women’s political leadership generate a far-right electoral backlash, and identify dominance-oriented masculinity—rather than gender norms per se—as the cultural margin along which it operates.

This paper investigates the long-term impact on innovation of the human-capital shock to British communities caused by World War I (WWI) soldier losses. Using a novel dataset linking parish-level WWI mortality to patent data (1895-1979) and inventor characteristics, we compare innovation in high- versus low-mortality areas. Difference-in-differences results show a persistent decline in patenting: a 10% increase in deaths reduces the likelihood of innovation by 0.08-0.11 percentage points and the likelihood of top innovations by roughly three times as much. Effects are larger when highskill individuals (elite graduates or engineer officers) are lost and are mitigated by innovationsupporting ecosystems (proximity to universities or connective infrastructure). At the inventor level, inventors in high mortality parishes patent less after the war, especially those with engineering background or working in advanced sectors. The adverse effects are partly offset by moving to less affected areas or by coauthorship, highlighting the role of complementary workers and innovation networks.

Local governments promise democratic responsiveness but are also vulnerable to political capture by illicit actors. While existing research documents the political and economic consequences of capture, less is known about how bureaucrats respond when political leadership is captured, whether they become instruments of corrupt rule or resist it. We examine these competing expectations in the context of Italian municipalities infiltrated by mafia organizations. Leveraging a law that allows the central government to dissolve captured municipal councils, we study how bureaucratic performance responds when political capture is abruptly removed. Using a difference-in-differences design with matched controls based on a machine-learning index of mafia-infiltration risk, we show that dissolutions substantially improve bureaucratic performance. Evidence from administrative data and investigative reports supports the interpretation that the lower performance during mafia rule was driven by bureaucrats resisting political capture. Our findings show that bureaucracies mitigate, rather than amplify, the downstream consequences of political capture.

We study the long-run health effects of illegal toxic waste disposal conducted by organized crime in Italy. We exploit quasi-random variation in historical wind direction around contaminated sites combined with a difference-in-differences design. Using administrative data on cancer deaths spanning four decades, we find that wind exposure to pollutants increases the number of cancer deaths substantially. The effects emerge after long latencies and grow over time. In later years, wind exposure implies roughly two additional cancer deaths per municipality-year relative to unexposed municipalities equally proximate to contaminated sites. Our findings reveal a previously unmeasured health externality of organized crime.

This paper proposes a novel methodology to identify the geographic market of local newspapers when information on their diffusion is not available or is not sufficiently granular. We illustrate the methodology using historical data from 154 newly digitized newspapers published in Italy between 1919 and 1922. Combining machine learning-augmented optical character recognition techniques, multi-way fixed-effect regressions, and GIS tools, our approach allows us to estimate markets based on news content. Text-based location of newspaper markets considerably improves over assuming that market boundaries coincide with administrative aggregations. We discuss how our technique strengthens the usage of newspapers as a granular and time-varying source of historical information and offers new avenues for identification strategies.

This paper investigates the causal effect of the term length of political executives on economic policy outcomes. To establish causality, we exploit the staggered adoption of four-year terms for governors across US states, using data for the period 1937-2008. We find that increasing governors’ tenure in office from two years to four years reduced state expenditures and revenues by approximately 0.3-0.5 percentage points of GDP. The effect on state finances is primarily driven by a reduction of current spending and grants from the federal government, and it is concentrated in states where the incumbent governor expects fierce competition in the next election. Lastly, we discuss the implications of longer terms for macroeconomic stabilization, political budget cycles, and intergovernmental resource allocation.

The Value-Added Tax (VAT) is widely recognized as being inherently self-enforcing because it features third-party reporting and spread withholding along the production chain. However, a growing literature documents significant VAT tax gaps, sparking interest in possible improvements to VAT design. Reverse Charge (RC) is among the main examples: recently adopted by multiple countries to a variety of industries, RC shifts the entire tax payment on retailers, which, however, remain subject to third-party reporting. Leveraging administrative firm-level data from Italy and a quasi-experimental variation, we show that RC leads to an increase of reported value added (+20 percent). The effect of RC is present across the distribution of firm size although it is stronger among small firms and companies that used to bunch around the zero-liability tax kink. On these firms, RC limits the incentive to under-report sales. On the other end of the distribution of firm size, we document that RC increased reported value-added by limiting over-reporting of purchases.

Successful economies rely upon effective lawmaking. Representatives must be effective legislators—able to craft and pass new laws—and voters must choose to
(re)elect these effective legislators, particularly when circumstances demand new laws. We analyze election outcomes from the U.S. House of Representatives, legislators’ legislative effectiveness scores, and exogenous increases in import competition from China between 2002 and 2010. We document that trade shock exposure significantly reduces the probability of reelection of incumbents who have a record of being (relatively) ineffective legislators. On the contrary, for incumbents with a record of being effective legislators, the adverse effects of trade shock exposure largely nullified; for very effective legislators, trade shock exposure even improves their electoral fortunes. We provide evidence that this result is driven by trade shock exposure increasing voters’ demand for policy change and, in turn, their support for more effective legislators. Our results have consequences for the effectiveness of future cohorts of legislators.

This paper documents large and long-lasting gender differences in the career returns from participating in an election. Among candidates who marginally win their primary for a seat in the US House of Representatives, women are 20 percent less likely than men to win the seat. Using a difference-in-discontinuities design, I then show that the gender gap in the probability of being elected translates into diverging future career outcomes. Women are substantially less likely than men to win future elections and to climb the political hierarchy. Similar results are obtained in the context of runoff mayoral elections in Italy.

We study the reaction of low vs. high-skilled politicians to a reform, approved in Italy in 2011, that introduces stringent individual financial and career sanctions to local administrators who are judged responsible for their municipality’s bankruptcy. To this aim, we leverage exogenous variation induced by close elections between a mayoral candidate who holds a college degree and a mayoral candidate who does not. After the introduction of sanctions, skilled politicians tend to declare bankruptcy with a higher probability than low-skilled politicians. The effect is concentrated in municipalities in which the financial state of distress was not advocating for a bankruptcy. Our findings document that individual sanctions against politicians may backfire if strategic considerations are not taken into account properly.