Working papers
"Roads to Fascism? State Capacity and the Spread of Political Violence", with Tommaso Celani, Luca Colombo, and Massimiliano Onorato
(Job Market Paper)
Presented at:
P&I Clinic, Bocconi University -- Authoritarianism and Nation Building Workshop, University of Bergamo -- Economic History Seminar, University of Bologna -- Political Economy WIP, Università Cattolica, Milan -- ASREC Europe, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki -- European Historical Economics Society, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart
We investigate the role of state capacity and political violence in favoring regime changes. Specifically, we examine the role of road networks in spreading fascist violence in the early 1920s in Italy. Using novel and detailed data on fascist violence, along with digitized maps of the Italian road network, we investigate the impact of road accessibility on the location and intensity of political violence. We address endogeneity issues by means of an instrumental variable approach based on the least-cost path network connecting local administritive centers. We find that proximity to the road network increased a municipality's exposure to violence and that both the extensive margin and the intensive margin were affected. We discuss the impact of fascist violence on the stability of local political institutions and the link with the establishment of new branches of the Fascist Party. Our conclusions suggest that incumbents may have strategic incentives to limit the development of infrastructures when they fear for their hold on political power.
"Historical Newspaper Markets", with Davide Cipullo, Luca Colombo, and Massimiliano Onorato
Presented at:
Internal Seminar, University of Bologna -- Political Economy Research Day, Università Cattolica, Milan -- ASREC Europe, University of Copenhagen
This paper proposes a novel methodology to identify the geographic market of local newspapers when information on their diffusion is not available or is not sufficiently granular. We illustrate the methodology using historical data from 154 daily or weekly newspapers published in Italy between 1919 and 1922. Combining machine learning-augmented optical character recognition techniques, multi-way fixed effect regressions, and GIS tools, our approach allows to estimate markets based on news content. Text-based location of newspaper markets considerably improves over assuming that market boundaries coincide with administrative aggregations. We discuss how our technique strengthens the usage of newspapers as a granular and time-varying source of historical information and offers new avenue for identification strategies.
Published papers
"Containment or Bad Detection? Poor State Capacity Implications on Reported Covid-19 Cases", with Alessandro Belmonte
Journal of Institutional Economics, 2025, vol. 21, doi:10.1017/S1744137424000195.
This paper examines the effects of state capacity on the reported Covid- 19 infection (and mortality) rate and its policy implications. We analyze two dimensions of state capacity which were critical during the pandemic. The healthcare capacity acted to contain the virus outbreak (an effect we call containment). The information capacity acted to detect contagious yet asymptomatic cases (an effect we call detection). We argue that containment pushes down the reported infection rate. In contrast, detection pushes it up, thus generating a non-linear combined effect that we estimate systematically using Colombian municipality-level as well as country-level data, different data sources, and various empirical strategies. Our findings indicate that the infection (and mortality) rates were likely under-reported, especially in areas with a low state capacity level, due to their poor capabilities to detect the virus. Our study put the emphasis on the many facets of state capacity, each affecting in complex ways our understanding of important phenomena, such as the Covid-19 outbreak.
Work in progress
"The Political Geography of Conflict in Europe, 1000-1900", with Matteo Cervellati, Sara Lazzaroni, Massimiliano Onorato, and Paolo Vanin
This paper provides a first attempt of systematic empirical investigation of the time-varying relationship between borders and conflicts in European history. We assemble a novel geo-referenced database with information on conflicts and borders in Europe from the year 1000 to 1900, with a panel structure at quarter of century frequency and 0.5x0.5 decimal degrees grid-cells as units of observation. Accounting for grid-cell and polity by time fixed effects, we show that, even before the emergence of the Westphalian state system, conflict was significantly more likely on and around contestable and salient borders (i.e., borders without mountains, crossed by roads, and close to urban centers). These results confirm predictions on the relevance of territoriality for conflict in pre-industrial Europe.
"Media sentiment under the threat of political violence", with Davide Cipullo, Luca Colombo, and Massimiliano Onorato
Building on a panel dataset of episodes of Fascist violence at the day-level in 1919-22, this project studies the strategic incentives for political violence related to media coverage. We collect and digitize approximately a hundred local newspapers from the early XX century that we process with OCR techniques in order to extract their texts. We exploit the newspaper content to reconstruct outlet-specific local media markets. Furthermore, we analyze the subject and tone of each article with natural language processing tools. We set up a spatial diff-in-disc research design in order to obtain meaningful causal estimates. The preliminary findings show that the probability of observing a Fascist attack sharply increases for municipalities just inside the media market as compared to similar municipalities just outside of it, suggesting that Fascist squads were aware of the propaganda potential of media attention. The tone shift in the journalistic coverage following a Fascist attack depends on the political leaning of each outlet, with moderate newspapers being comparatively more likely to adopt a Fascist-like stance, displaying larger similarity in their textual content with an official Fascist newspaper used as benchmark.
"Municipal Fiscal Capacity", with Alessandro Belmonte, Massimiliano Onorato
We study the effect of fiscal capacity at the subnational level on the provision of public goods. Setting the analysis against the backdrop of the late XIX century newborn Kingdom of Italy, we exploit a sharp discontinuity in the municipality capability to levy taxes. Right after the Unification, a 1864 law created a dual system for the collection of the consumption tax, with towns above the 8000 inhabitants cutoff allowed to set up a custom belt and tax the goods upon the entrance of the town rather than at retail. We digitize three waves of municipal budget censuses for the universe of Italian municipalities from 1884, 1895, and 1912, and exploit the policy to implement a regression discontinuity design comparing municipalities around the cutoff. The local randomization at the population threshold allows us to obtain a causal estimate of the effect of municipal autonomy in the tax collection domain on further dimensions, such as education spending at the municipal level.