Environmental & Climate Policy

This research area examines how environmental and climate policies influence regional innovation, economic performance, and environmental quality. One of my earlier works used comprehensive measures of environmental quality — beyond just pollutant emissions — to assess how institutional factors affect ecosystem health and overall environmental performance. More recent projects focus on the EU Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), exploring regional “carbon burden” and its links with innovation and competitiveness.

Going forward, I plan to invest more in this line of research, particularly on sustainability transitions, leveraging big data (especially geospatial) to better capture regional heterogeneity and support policy decisions with rich, evidence-based findings.

Selected publications/working papers:

• Carbon Pricing, Regional Innovation, and Spatial Equity: An EU-ETS Assessment at the NUTS-2 Level (working paper, with N. Fagni & A. Martuscelli).

• Lisciandra & Migliardo (2017), “An Empirical Study of the Impact of Corruption on Environmental Performance,” Environmental and Resource Economics.

Institutional Economics & Commons

This research area investigates how collective governance, property rights, and membership rules shape long-run development paths and social organization. A central theme is the way institutions regulating access to common resources affect demographic patterns, household formation, and inequality over centuries. The analysis emphasizes the dynamic interaction between institutions and incentives, showing how rules of inclusion and exclusion determine who benefits from local resources and how these benefits are transmitted across generations.

Taken together, this body of work highlights how path dependence plays a crucial role: early institutional choices created distinct institutional trajectories that influenced migration flows, endogamy rates, and community resilience. By combining archival evidence, cadastral data, and historical registers with modern quantitative tools, these studies trace how communities adjusted (or failed to adjust) to economic and environmental pressures.

Looking forward, this research line will deepen the comparative analysis of institutional trajectories across regions and time periods, leveraging digitized charters, cadastral maps, and other big data sources. The goal is to better understand how formal and informal governance systems evolve under stress and what this reveals about the conditions for successful institutional adaptation and sustainable community development.

Selected publications:

Casari, Lisciandra & Saral (2025), “From Open to Closed Societies: Inequality, Migration, and Women’s Rights,” Journal of Development Economics.

Casari & Lisciandra (2016), “Gender Discrimination in Property Rights: Six Centuries of Commons Governance in the Alps,” Journal of Economic History.

Casari, Lisciandra & Tagliapietra (2019), “Property Rights, Marriage, and Fertility in the Italian Alps,” Explorations in Economic History.

Law & Economics of Governance and Integrity

This research area explores how legal rules, enforcement mechanisms, and institutional design shape incentives for compliant or illicit behavior. It examines the conditions under which governance systems succeed or fail in preventing corruption and safeguarding the integrity of public decision-making. Recent work has focused on developing indicators for corruption risk in public procurement and analyzing the fiscal and political economy mechanisms that enable opportunistic behavior in local government.

Methodologically, this research combines formal modelling with empirical strategies that use administrative datasets and institutional micro-data to identify patterns and causal mechanisms. Looking ahead, the focus is on improving the measurement of institutional performance and understanding how incentive structures, monitoring systems, and accountability frameworks can be designed to reduce vulnerabilities. The ultimate aim is to produce evidence that supports more transparent, effective, and resilient institutions.

Selected publications:

Lisciandra, Miralles Asensio & Monteforte(2024), “Corruption Dynamics and Political Instability,” Journal of Public Economic Theory.

Bracco, De Benedetto & Lisciandra (2024), “Manipulating municipal budgets: unveiling opportunistic behavior of Italian mayors,” Public Choice.

Lisciandra, Milani & Millemaci (2022), “A corruption risk indicator for public procurement,” European Journal of Political Economy.