Abstract: This paper models theoretically and tests empirically the hypothesis that the decision about the location of a public bad within a multi-tiered structure of government (a facility providing benefits throughout the federation but inflicting damage to the region hosting it) can be driven by strategic electoral considerations exploiting the heterogeneous migration responses to the location of the public bad by voters of different ideologies - a sort of mobility-based gerrymandering. As long as the average utility loss from living close to the public bad is larger for progressives than it is for conservatives, conservative and progressive central governments will pursue opposite strategies. The former locate the public bad in an electorally tight region to induce progressive voters to exit and gain the region for the conservative party, while the latter attempt to spread progressive voters out of safe and into electorally tight regions. An application to waste treatment plant locations across Italian municipalities returns evidence in support of the model’s main hypotheses.

Abstract: This paper models theoretically and tests empirically the hypothesis that the decision about the location of a public bad within a multi-tiered structure of government (a facility providing benefits throughout the federation but inflicting damage to the region hosting it) can be driven by strategic electoral considerations exploiting the heterogeneous migration responses to the location of the public bad by voters of different ideologies - a sort of mobility-based gerrymandering. As long as the average utility loss from living close to the public bad is larger for progressives than it is for conservatives, conservative and progressive central governments will pursue opposite strategies. The former locate the public bad in an electorally tight region to induce progressive voters to exit and gain the region for the conservative party, while the latter attempt to spread progressive voters out of safe and into electorally tight regions. An application to waste treatment plant locations across Italian municipalities returns evidence in support of the model’s main hypotheses.

Abstract: Despite growing concern about climate change, collective action remains limited. We study whether climate-risk salience can close this gap using two pre-registered experiments: an online survey with a nationally representative sample and an incentivized laboratory experiment. Both compare behavior in non-strategic and strategic settings, including donations and cooperation in a Collective Risk Social Dilemma. Framing climate change through natural disasters increases environmental concern, strengthens personal normative beliefs, and raises donations to environmental causes, but does not increase cooperation when action is exposed to free-riding. Climate-migration framing has weaker average effects and mainly shifts donations toward migration-related causes. Laboratory evidence shows that nature-risk framing induces a defensive physiological response and greater probability distortion, but these changes do not explain cooperation. Instead, the results point to strategic uncertainty and delegation to institutions as key barriers to collective climate action. Climate-risk salience thus increases prosociality without overcoming coordination failures.

Abstract: This study uses the 2014 Ebola epidemic as a natural experiment to examine the political effects of anti-immigration narratives linking immigration to perceived threats. Despite few cases in Italy, the outbreak generated widespread concern, with extreme-right politicians framing immigration as a public-health risk. Using a Differences-in-Differences design, we analyze changes in support for the Lega party across Northern Italian municipalities, exploiting historical immigrant clusters from affected countries as a proxy for local exposure to perceived health risks. Results suggest that such narratives can backfire: support for Lega declined in areas with higher concentrations of risk-Ebola migrants, while moderate parties gained ground. Twitter data show a contemporaneous reduction in expressed fear of migrants in these areas, with both sentiment and electoral effects concentrated in provinces with less positive pre-Ebola attitudes toward immigrants. These patterns are consistent with a backlash among right-wing voters linked to a loss of party credibility, alongside a “rally ’round the flag”–type response favoring political moderation during crises.

In times of hardship, politicians often leverage citizens’ discontent and scapegoat minorities to obtain political support. This paper tests whether political campaigns scapegoating migrants for a health crisis affect social, political, and economic attitudes and behaviors. Through an online nationally-representative survey experiment in Italy, we analyze the effects of such narratives through information-provision treatments, which include facts also emphasizing the alleged health consequences of ongoing immigration. Results show that narratives associating immigration with health threats do not generate sizeable add-on effects compared to those based on immigration only. If anything, they increase disappointment towards co-nationals, reduce institutional trust, and undermine partisanship among extreme-right supporters. Results are consistent with a theoretical framework where party credibility and support, and institutional trust are influenced by political discourse. Our experiment underpins the prediction that political campaigns based on extreme narratives can be ineffective or socially and politically counterproductive, providing an example of how populism can backfire.

This paper exploits the extension of a policy aimed at reducing the fiscal gap in 2013, which produced exogenous variations in the budgets of some Italian municipalities based on their size (i.e., the number of inhabitants). Our theoretical argument is that efficient public spending can have a positive effect on local economic growth. Results show that, due to such budget constraints, municipal governments react by containing unproductive expenditures, stimulating economic development. The main operating channel appears to be a more efficient allocation of expenditures and improved accountability of local governments. The effect is substantial where corruption is low, suggesting that fiscal rules are more effective in well-governed settings.

In this paper, we investigate how waiting times impact mortality rates in Italy. Our approach leverages historical disparities in diagnostic technology availability across Italian regions to tease out causality. Findings suggest that extended waiting times contribute to higher mortality rates, with larger effects for cardiovascular-related treatments and diagnostic procedures rather than cancer-related treatments. We explore potential mechanisms, revealing that delays in waiting times can lead to increased mortality due to decreased institutional quality, particularly associated with corruption, and to the consequences of cost containment to reduce the budget when the balance constraint is tight.

This paper offers evidence on the parental education and sons’ earnings relationship by analyzing the father and mother education gradient across the full distribution of sons’ earnings. It uses an unconditional quantile approach based on recentered influence function regressions and applies an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition at various quantiles of the earning distribution to explain time, gender and geographical differentials in earnings. Using six waves of the Survey of Income and Wealth (from 2004 to 2014) for Italy, I find evidence of higher returns to family education in the upper percentiles of the distribution of son’s earnings with the probability of ending up in high deciles being significantly correlated with the education level of the father. Results show an important heterogeneity in the association of parental education as well as of individual covariates to sons’ earnings across time, gender and geographical areas of the country which varies significantly along the earning distribution and accounts for a substantial percentage of the differentials in observed earnings.