Working Papers:

Cultural Exception? The Impact of Price Regulation on Prices and Variety in the Market for Books (with Christos Genakos, Mario Pagliero, and Tommaso Valletti)

Fixed book price (FBP) agreements are a form of resale price maintenance applied to books in various countries. FBP restricts retail price competition with the aim of promoting book production variety. Yet, despite its popularity and adoption in many countries, there is no empirical evidence on its effects. We offer systematic evidence on the impact of FBP on book variety and prices using a detailed new dataset from Italy that includes the universe of books published and bought, before and after the introduction of FBP. Our results indicate that FBP raises prices without significantly affecting the number of new books published in the marketplace. However, it also increases considerably the variety of books actually bought, especially from independent bookstores. We estimate a structural demand model that accounts for both effects, finding that consumers overall benefit from the regulation.

• Supplemental Appendix

• CEP Discussion Paper CEPDP2085

• Coverage: LSE EUROPP, NOVA POLICY Bites

Information Technology and Road Safety (with Giorgio Caramma)

Accepted at  Regional Science and Urban Economics

In this paper, we study how information technology (IT) affects road safety through higher enforcement of traffic laws. Thanks to unique administrative geo-localized data on the universe of road accidents in a major Italian city, we assess the impact of IT on road safety within a quasi-random experiment that exploits the roll-out of intelligent red-light cameras in road intersections. Our findings suggest that IT-based enforcement significantly reduces accidents, both in the short and long run. The impact is extremely local, and it is not driven by displacement effects toward uncontrolled roads. Exploring potential mechanisms, we find that increased road safety can be explained by higher coordination: IT improves coordination among road users by restraining them toward more compliant behavior. In turn, this affects overall road safety. Finally, a simple cost-benefit analysis shows large revenues from ticketing for the local administration, as well as significant savings compared to police patrols.

Advanced Digital Technologies and Firm-Level Employment Outcomes (with Laura Abrardi, Carlo Cambini, and Elena Grinza)

Resubmitted at  Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics

This paper investigates the effects of ultra-fast broadband (UBB) availability on firms’ employment levels and their workforce composition. We utilize a unique and comprehensive municipality-level data set on the deployment of UBB connections in Italy, which began in 2015. Exploiting information on firms’ locations, we match this municipality-level data set with a rich administrative matched employer-employee balanced data set from 2012 to 2019. To address the endogeneity of UBB, we leverage the physical distance between each municipality and the nearest optical packet backbone node. Our instrumental variable re- gressions suggest a positive and significant effect of UBB on overall firm-level employment. When considering different categories of workers, by job contract type and the skill content of jobs, as well as the technological intensity of firms, we detect substantially differentiated UBB effects. We find complementarity effects of UBB with high-level jobs, particularly in the high-tech sector. Moreover, only for low-tech firms, we document a substitution effect of UBB with qualified blue-collar jobs.