Suchergebnisse

This paper investigates the relationship between Sicilian mafia and politics by focusing on municipality-level results of national political elections. It exploits the fact that in the early 1990s the Italian party system collapsed, new parties emerged and mafia families had to look for new political allies. It presents evidence, based on disaggregated data from the Italian region of Sicily, that between 1994 and 2013 Silvio Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, obtained higher vote shares at national elections in municipalities plagued by mafia. The result is robust to the use of different measures of mafia presence, both contemporary and historical, to the inclusion of different sets of controls and to spatial analysis. Instrumenting mafia's presence by determinants of its early diffusion in the late XIX century suggests that the correlation reflects a causal link.

This paper investigates the relationship between mafia and politics by focusing on the market for votes. It exploits the fact that in the early 1990s the Italian party system collapsed, new parties emerged and mafia families had to look for new political allies. It presents evidence, based on disaggregated data from the Italian region of Sicily, that between 1994 and 2008 Silvio Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, obtained higher vote shares in municipalities plagued by mafia. The result is robust to the use of different measures of mafia presence, both contemporary and historical, to the inclusion of different sets of controls and to spatial analysis. Instrumenting mafia's presence by determinants of its early diffusion in the late XIX century suggests that the correlation reflects a causal link, which would be coherent with mafia's choice to back Forza Italia in exchange for favorable policies.

A previous version circulated under the title "Government Information Transparency" ; In this paper, we investigate how government transparency depends on economic distortions. We first consider an abstract class of economies in which a benevolent policy maker is privately informed about the exogenous state of the economy and contemplates whether to release this information. Our key result is that distortions limit communication: even if transparency is ex ante Pareto superior to opaqueness, it cannot constitute an equilibrium when distortions are sufficiently high. We next confirm this broad insight in two applied contexts, in which monopoly power and income taxes are the specific sources of distortions. © 2014 by the European Economic Association. ; Albornoz is grateful for support from the ESRC (RES-062-23-1360), Esteban for support from the Generalitat de Catalunya and the CICYT (SEJ2006-00369) and from the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, and Vanin for support from the University of Padua (CPDA071899) ; Peer Reviewed

This paper investigates the relationship between mafia and politics by focusing on the market for votes. It exploits the fact that in the early 1990s the Italian party system collapsed, new parties emerged and mafia families had to look for new political allies. It presents evidence, based on disaggregated data from the Italian region of Sicily, that between 1994 and 2008 Silvio Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, obtained higher vote shares in municipalities plagued by mafia. The result is robust to the use of different measures of mafia presence, both contemporary and historical, to the inclusion of different sets of controls and to spatial analysis. Instrumenting mafia's presence by determinants of its early diffusion in the late XIX century suggests that the correlation reflects a causal link, which would be coherent with mafia's choice to back Forza Italia in exchange for favorable policies.

In this paper, we investigate how government transparency depends on economic distortions. We first consider an abstract class of economies in which a benevolent policy maker is privately informed about the exogenous state of the economy and contemplates whether to release this information. Our key result is that distortions limit communication: even if transparency is ex ante Pareto superior to opaqueness, it cannot constitute an equilibrium when distortions are sufficiently high. We next confirm this broad insight in two applied contexts, in which monopoly power and income taxes are the specific sources of distortions. (JEL: D82, E61)

We report results from an incentivized laboratory experiment to provide controlled evidence on the causal effects of alcohol consumption on risk preferences, time perception and altruism. Our design allows disentangling the pharmacological effects of alcohol intoxication from those mediated by expectations, as we compare behaviors of three groups of subjects: those participating to an experiment with no reference to alcohol, those exposed to the possibility of consuming alcohol but assigned to a placebo and those having effectively consumed alcohol. Once randomly assigned to one treatment, subjects were administered a series of consecutive economic tasks, being the sequence kept constant across treatments. After controlling for both the willingness to pay and the potential misperception of probabilities as elicited in the experiment, we do not detect any effect of alcohol in depleting subjects' risk tolerance. On the contrary, we find that alcohol intoxication increases impatience. Moreover, we find that alcohol makes subjects less generous as we detect a negative relationship between the blood alcohol concentration and the amount of money donated to NGOs.

47 pages, 2 figures.-- JEL Classification Codes: D82, E61. ; This paper studies a model of announcements by a privately informed government about the future state of the economic activity in an economy subject to recurrent shocks and with distortions due to income taxation. Although transparent communication would ex ante be desirable, we find that even a benevolent government may ex-post be non-informative, in an attempt to countervail the tax distortion with a "second best" compensating distortion in information. This result provides a rationale for independent national statistical offices, committed to truthful communication. We also find that whether inequality in income distribution favors or harms government transparency depends on labor supply elasticity. ; Esteban is a member of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and is grateful for support from the Generalitat de Catalunya and the CICYT (SEJ2006-00369) and from the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales. ; Peer reviewed

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