The Baccarini Law railways, constructed in the 1880s and 1890s, first connected many small centers of the Italian interior to the rest of the country. We study their economic impact on the connected municipalities over the period 1901-1991, focusing on population and employment growth. To identify a causal impact of the railways, we instrument for their allocation using a municipality’s electoral alignment with the local member of parliament, in closed elections. We find that the Baccarini Law railways did have a positive economic impact, but only about 60-70 years after they were constructed (in 1951-1991). In this period, the connected municipalities experienced much faster population growth and employment growth in commerce (especially retail commerce and banking & insurance), manufacturing (especially food and beverages), and education and health services. These results indicate that, while not having a growth effect in the short and medium run, the Baccarini Law railways gave the connected municipalities a competitive edge during the post-WWII economic boom.

This study explores the factors that shape natives’ attitudes toward citizenship acquisition for foreigners. The hypothesis is that, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the slave trade represents a deep determinant of contemporary attitudes toward citizenship, through a proximate determinant which is the level of trust. Accordingly, individuals belonging to ethnic groups with higher exposure to historical slave exports are more likely to exhibit a sense of distrust toward strangers, and are consequently more likely to oppose citizenship laws that favor the inclusion of foreigners. The findings indicate that individuals with higher levels of trust toward other people do exhibit more favorable attitudes regarding the acquisition of citizenship at birth for children of foreigners, that these attitudes are also negatively related to the intensity of the slave trade, and that the underlying inverse relationship between trust and the slave trade is confirmed. Other factors such as conflict, kinship tightness, and witchcraft beliefs, which could also influence attitudes toward citizenship through the channel of trust, do not yield the same distinct pattern of associations as observed with the slave trade. 

We study the political economy of transport infrastructure placement and its long-term impact, exploiting quasi-random variation in political factors. Using unique data from XIX-century Italy and deploying a regression discontinuity design, we focus on close races to show that towns in marginal districts supporting winning candidates were more likely to be reached by a railway. Using political alignment as a natural instrument for infrastructure placement, we then show that over the following century, services - rather than manufacturing - grew faster in connected municipalities. Our results also indicate that railways reached towns with lower growth prospects. 

This paper studies the joint evolution of kin ties and state institutions across the world and over time. First, I study the geographical forces that have historically driven the evolution of both kin ties and state institutions, based on the assumption that historical societies featured an equilibrium between kin ties and formal institutions reflecting the scope of prevailing economic relations. I exploit historical ethnographic data and combine it with measures of climate intertemporal volatility and spatial variability to establish that the need to protect from weather shocks historically led to weaker kin ties and more developed state institutions. Second, I explore the long-run persistence of historical differences in kin ties and state institutions. Employing country-level institutional quality measures from the 19th century to the present and linking modern countries’ populations with the characteristics of their historical ancestors, I determine that countries whose populations’ ancestors were characterised by more developed state institutions and weaker kin ties are associated with modern institutions of significantly higher quality.

This research advances the hypothesis that precolonial state institutions had an impact on attitudes towards modern-day state institutions in African countries. To address the question empirically, I combine contemporary individual-level survey data with historical data on precolonial political centralisation by ethnic group. By employing an identification strategy based on the current location of survey respondents and the disease environment of the ethnic groups' historical homelands, I determine that individuals belonging to ethnic groups that were characterised by a precolonial state show significantly higher levels of trust in modern-day state institutions. By examining a variety of potential mechanisms and alternative explanations, and through numerous robustness checks, I establish the role played by culturally embodied norms and beliefs transmitted intergenerationally within ethnic groups in determining the impact of precolonial states.