Suchergebnisse

Local governments suspected of Mafia infiltration can be dismissed in Italy through an administrative act not increasing formal deterrence but potentially signaling improved law enforcement among local communities. This paper finds that dismissals are associated to a persistent fall of petty crimes (e.g. thefts) but have no consequences on offenses more closely related to the activity of organized crime, as homicide, extortion, drug-trafficking or usury. Petty crimes are estimated to fall by around 10%, on average, a result that seems driven by the perception of enhanced deterrence (through media pressure, the signaling role of the policy, and other forms of social control) rather than induced by organized crime itself.

This paper analyzes the joint effect of EPL and financial market imperfections on investment, capital-labour substitution, labour productivity and job reallocation in a cross-country framework. In the spirit of Rajan and Zingales (1998) and Ciccone and Papaioannou (2006), we exploit variation in the need for reallocation at the sectoral and aggregate level to assess the average effect of EPL on firms' policies. Then, exploiting firm-level information we study if the effect of EPL is stronger in firms with lower levels of internal resources. We find that, on average, EPL reduces investment per worker, capital per worker and value added per worker in high reallocation sectors relative to low reallocation sectors. The reduction in the capital-labour ratio is less pronounced in firms with higher internal resources, suggesting that financial constraints exacerbate the negative effects of EPL on capital deepening

We estimate the effects of a large program of public investment subsidies granted to Italian firms in disadvantaged areas. Projects were given numerical scores according to objective criteria and local politicians' preferences, and funded in rank order until the funds were fully allocated. We estimate that subsidies increased investment by marginal firms near the cutoff by 39 percent, and employment by 17 percent over a 6-year period. Building on recent advancements in the econometrics of regression discontinuity designs, we characterize heterogeneity of treatment effects and cost-per-new-job across inframarginal firms away from the cutoff. Employment grows more in smaller firms, but larger firms generated more jobs-per-euro of subsidy. Younger firms did better than older firms. Firms ranking high on objective criteria and firms preferred by local politicians generated larger employment growth on average, but the latter did so at a higher cost per job. Under a policy invariance assumption, we estimate that eliminating political discretion and relying only on objective criteria would reduce the cost per job by 9 percent, while relying only on political discretion would increase the cost by 55 percent. The effect of political discretion is larger in the south, which received the largest share of funds and exhibited the highest cost-per-job under the actual allocation criteria.