In this paper, we investigate how waiting times impact mortality rates for ten health diagnostic treatments 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. We explore potential mechanisms, revealing that delays in waiting times can lead to increased mortality due to decreased institutional quality, particularly associated with corruption.

This paper investigates the political consequences of perceived health risks associated with immigration in Italy. We leverage the exogeneity of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, which resulted in almost no cases in Italy but triggered a significant public reaction, with extreme right-wing politicians claiming ongoing immigration could endanger citizens’ health. In a differences-in-differences framework, we examine the changes in the vote share of the main right-wing and anti-immigration party, Lega, across Northern Italian municipalities before and during the Ebola outbreak. Treatment is based on perceived exposure to risk-Ebola immigrants, proxied by the local historical concentration of immigrants from countries affected by Ebola in 2014. Results document a drop in political support for Lega in municipalities with a larger share of risk-Ebola migrants. Our findings, robust to falsification tests and alternative treatment definitions, suggest that strategically exploiting a health crisis to garner support for anti-immigrant policies can eventually backfire.

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.

Fiscal rules are often implemented to limit the budget deficits of local governments. Such fiscal policy enforcement may have the unintended effect of limiting the opportunistic behaviour of local administrators. This paper exploits the extension of a policy aimed at imposing a reduction in the fiscal gap (the Domestic Stability Pact) that produces exogenous variations in the budget of some Italian municipalities. Results show that due to such budget constraints, municipal governments react by containing unproductive expenditures, positively affecting economic development. The main operating channel might be a more efficient allocation of expenditures and the improved accountability of local governments.

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.