Suchergebnisse

In this paper we perform an empirical analysis to investigate the impact of socio-economic heterogeneity on electoral turnout. We exploit a unique dataset on local elections in an Italian municipality, which merges information on socio-economic characteristics of about 370.000 individuals with turnout data at the precinct level in 2004 and 2009. Controlling for unobserved precinct-specific fixed effects, we find that electoral turnout is not affected by income inequality. We also document a negative effect on electoral participation of the share of immigrants, population density, and the share of singles. These results suggest that increased ethnic heterogeneity and reduced social pressure tend to depress turnout.

We empirically investigate whether the persistence of politicians in political institutions affects the innovation activity of firms. We use 12,000 firm-level observations from three waves of the Italian Observatory over Small and Medium Enterprises, and introduce a measure of political persistence defined as the average length of individual political careers in political institutions of Italian municipalities. Standard OLS shows no raw correlation between political persistence and firms' innovation activity. However, once the causal effect is isolated by means of instrumental variables, using death of politicians as an exogenous source of variation of political persistence, we find a robust negative relation between political persistence and the probability of process innovation. This finding is consistent with the view that political stability may hinder firms' incentive to innovate to maintain their competitiveness, as long as they can extract rents from long-term connections with politicians

Using data on a panel of 56 democratic countries in the period 1975-2004, we find evidence of a negative association between political stability and economic growth which is stronger and empirically more robust in countries with high bureaucratic costs. Motivated by these results, which contrast with previous contributions, we develop a model of growth with quality improvements where political connections with long-term politicians can be exploited by low-quality producers to defend their monopoly position and prevent innovation and entry of high-quality competitors. This requires that the incumbent politician remains in office and that the red-tape cost advantage granted by political connections is large relative to the quality upgrade related to innovation. Consistently with our empirical findings, the model delivers a negative association between the probability that the incumbent politician remains in office and average economic growth in the presence of high bureaucratic costs.

This paper associates political instability to real shocks affecting the income of the median voter, in a two-period model where two political parties set redistribution in order to defend the interests of well-de¯ned constituencies. Implemented policies affect future voting outcomes and an intertemporal trade-off arises for the parties since their optimal one-period strategy does not maximize the probability of being reelected. The higher the volatility of the real shock, the more likely that parties deviate from the optimal one-period strategy by choosing a conservative strategy, which increases their chances of reelection and the expected lifetime utility of their constituencies.

This paper associates political instability to real shocks affecting the income of the median voter, in a two-period model where two political parties set redistribution in order to defend the interests of well-de¯ned constituencies. Implemented policies affect future voting outcomes and an intertemporal trade-off arises for the parties since their optimal one-period strategy does not maximize the probability of being reelected. The higher the volatility of the real shock, the more likely that parties deviate from the optimal one-period strategy by choosing a conservative strategy, which increases their chances of reelection and the expected lifetime utility of their constituencies.

We model a society that values the coherence between past policy platforms and current implemented policy, and where policy platforms partially commit candidates to their future actions. If an incumbent politician seeks to be reelected, she has to use her platforms to commit to moderate policies that can be distant from her most preferred one. Commitment is related to the incoherence cost that politicians pay when they renege on promised platforms. In this context, we suggest a novel mechanism through which issuing government debt can affect electoral results. Debt is exploited by an incumbent politician, who is in favor of low spending, to damage the credibility of her opponent's policy platforms, and be reelected. A higher level of debt decreases voters' most preferred level of spending, and makes the opponent's past platform a losing policy. Even if the latter chose to update her proposal, she would not be able to credibly commit to it, given the incoherence cost associated to changing proposals.

We model a society that values the coherence between past policy platforms and current implemented policy, and where policy platforms partially commit candidates to their future actions. If an incumbent politician seeks to be reelected, she has to use her platforms to commit to moderate policies that can be distant from her most preferred one. Commitment is related to the incoherence cost that politicians pay when they renege on promised platforms. In this context, we suggest a novel mechanism through which issuing government debt can affect electoral results. Debt is exploited by an incumbent politician, who is in favor of low spending, to damage the credibility of her opponent's policy platforms, and be reelected. A higher level of debt decreases voters' most preferred level of spending, and makes the opponent's past platform a losing policy. Even if the latter chose to update her proposal, she would not be able to credibly commit to it, given the incoherence cost associated to changing proposals.

Differently from Atkinson and Morelli (2011) who detect no clear link between increases in income inequality and systemic banking crises, we show that a large majority of crises occurred between 1982 and 2008 have been preceded by persistently high levels of income inequality. Such association is robust when considering Gini values for incomes after-tax as well as before-tax and transfers. Moreover, we investigate the pattern of income inequality levels before and after a group of banking crises and the relative levels of income inequality in a large sample of OECD countries that did not experience banking crises between 1980 and 2010.