Giacomo Plevani

Publications 

Earthquake Hazard and Civic Capital  (with Paolo Buonanno and Marcello Puca).  European Journal of Political Economy, Volume 78, June 2023. 

Working Papers

Planting the Seeds of Polarization: Sharecropping, Agrarian Conflict and Enduring Political Divides (with Paolo Buonanno).  Submitted  

This paper shows how enduring agrarian institutions shaped the long-run political consequences of historical shocks. We study Italy’s sharecropping system (mezzadria)—a centuries-old fifty–fifty contract that structured rural relations across central Italy—and link its prewar prevalence to Socialist and Communist voting from 1913 to 1948. Using harmonized data for 720 agrarian zones and a combination of cross-sectional, entropy-balanced, and spatial RDD designs, we find that sharecropping was politically neutral before World War I but became a center of rural unrest and Fascist repression afterward. Areas with more sharecroppers experienced greater strike activity, targeted violence, and enduring left alignment. A daily panel of 1921 events shows repression peaking during annual contract renewals. The results reveal a “revolt–repression–realignment” mechanism through which local economic institutions converted wartime shocks into lasting partisan divides.

Industrialization and Social Mobility Within a City: Evidence from Interwar Turin (Awarded the EIEF 2021 Grant).  Submitted 

This paper asks whether industrialization raises intergenerational mobility within cities. I study Turin, a major Italian industrial hub in the early twentieth century, using repeated 5% samples of the 1911, 1921, and 1936 population censuses digitized from household ``family sheets''. I construct occupation-based earnings scores and measure relative mobility with the Information Content of Surnames (ICS). Citywide ICS falls by about one half between 1911 and 1936; a linear calibration to modern Italian evidence implies that the intergenerational elasticity declines from roughly 0.62 to 0.29, and absolute upward mobility from the bottom of the earnings distribution increases. These aggregate gains are highly uneven in space. Mobility improvements are sharply concentrated in the industrial belt—peripheral in 1911 but largely integrated into the built-up city by 1936—where mechanical and metallurgical employment expands. A surname-based relocation split shows systematically higher mobility among movers into these neighborhoods. Industrialization in interwar Turin thus operated through a combination of local occupational upgrading and selective within-city reallocation toward emerging industrial areas, creating spatial mobility escalators inside the city.

When we rebel? clashing narratives and the making of subversive identities (with Matteo Cervellati, Elena Esposito and Alessandro Saia).  

Individuals sometimes take extraordinary personal risks to resist and fight oppressive regimes. Material incentives alone fail to fully explain these life-threatening decisions, which appear to be largely driven by a profound sense of injustice and strong emotional motivations. This paper provides evidence of the significant role that immaterial incentives play in motivating rebellion, by examining the formation of subversive identities in Italy following World War I. We reconstruct the history of Italian families, tracing patterns of dissent and rebellion from the early 20th century through World War II. Using these novel data, we examine how a government propaganda campaign—the passage of the train carrying the Unknown Soldier—interacted with personal histories of grievance and loss, fostering the formation of subversive identities and increasing the likelihood of rebellion against the rising Fascist regime. Looking at individual participation in the armed resistance in WWII, we next isolate the longer-term role of the post-WWI propaganda campaign, the emergence of oppositional identities within families, and the role of early political dissenters in catalyzing the armed fight that put an end to the dictatorship.

Selected Work in Progress 

Monarchy vs Republic: Historical Evidence on Individual Preferences and their Roots (with Matteo Cervellati and Sara Lazzaroni). [Draft coming soon] 

In a unprecedented and still unique instance of self-determination in nation building, the institutional form of the state at the moment of democratization in 1946 Italy has been chosen with a referendum held in universal franchise. The vote involved around 25 million people with all women and a large majority of men voting for the very first time. The referendum offers a unique opportunity to study individual preferences over democratic institutions in the population at large at the moment of democratization. We study how the exposure to republican and monarchic rule in historical times shaped individual preferences for free institutions during democratization. We provide a measurement of political history over the 1000–1861 time period for around 8,000 municipalities. Evidence shows that higher intensity of exposure to republican, respectively monarchic, rule in the past is a main determinant of the vote. Alternative identification strategies and checks, including the use of local variation, IV and spatial RDD strategies, bolster a causal interpretation of the findings. Large effort is devoted to validation and mechanisms. Accounting for conditions in 1946 confirms the role of political history and documents that socio-economic conditions at the moment of the vote (inequality, education and sectoral employment), experience of nazi-fascist massacres, war violence, and exposure to radio propaganda also matter. For both validation and mechanism, we assemble a database on historical local statutes in pre-industrial times. Within municipality panel variation show that political history in quarter-centuries leads to the emergence of charters granting freedom and self-governance. Finally, we look at large scale surveys, to study the impact on the support for democracy and trust in political institutions half a century after democratization.

Sharecropping and gender roles (with Paolo Buonanno and Elena Pisanelli).

Long run mobility and elite persistance.