Government transfers might have long-lasting consequences on electoral outcomes. We study a regional policy implemented in Italy over the second half of the twentieth century and leverage variation in transfers to show that parties promoting more state intervention in the economy performed better in the targeted areas relative to places that were not subsidized, decades after the end of the policy. This effect does not seem to mirror long-term differences in the economic performance of treated and control areas, which were small, nor other attitudes within the electorate.

This paper investigates the effects of demographic shifts on labor productivity by leveraging variation in the age structure of Italian regions. These effects are analyzed along a first channel – the direct relation between population age and productivity – and a second channel capturing the productivity implications of a more or less dispersed age distribution. We propose an estimation framework that relates regional productivity to the entire age distribution of the working-age population and use instrumental variable techniques to address endogeneity issues. The estimates yield a hump-shaped age-productivity profile peaking between 35 and 40 years. We also document non-linear effects of regional age dispersion on productivity.

This paper studies a place-based industrial policy (PBIP) aiming to establish industrial clusters in Italy in the 1960s-70s. Combining historical archives spanning one century with administrative data and leveraging exogenous variation in government intervention, we investigate both the immediate effects of PBIP and its long-term implications for local development. We document agglomeration of workers and firms in the targeted areas persisting well after the end of the policy. By promoting high-technology manufacturing, PBIP favored demand for business services and the emergence of a skilled local workforce. Over time, this produced a spillover from manufacturing---the only sector targeted by the program---to services, especially in knowledge-intensive jobs. Accordingly, we observe higher local wages and human capital in the long run. We provide suggestive evidence that the persistent effects of PBIP depend on the initial conditions of host locations.

This paper presents micro-empirical evidence on the effects of wage-setting decentralization. Our setting is Italy, where employers are required to comply with occupation- and industry-specific wage floors set by national collective bargaining agreements. We show that opting out of these agreements reduces wages but increases workers’ employment and retention within firms. These effects are most pronounced in the more productive North, where the overall impact on workers’ earnings is slightly positive. In contrast, in the South, wage losses outweigh employment gains, leading to a net decline in earnings. We also find that increased wage-setting flexibility is associated with higher firm survival rates in both regions. The regional divergence in outcomes aligns with a monopsony framework in which productivity and labor supply elasticities vary spatially.

This paper documents substantial fiscal waste in the context of one the world’s largest regional development programs -- the EU Cohesion Policy. We study Italy, and find that 20% of funding commitments are never paid out and funneled into unfinished or never-started projects. In our setting, this happens for reasons unrelated to fiscal constraints -- municipalities appear to simply leave money on the table. Foregone spending is more prevalent in Southern regions, but there is also stark variation across municipalities within regions. We show that such under-utilization of available funds is strongly associated with limited administrative capacity of local governments.

This paper examines how wage caps for public sector managers influence their career trajectories and the selection of talent into public employment. We study a 2014 reform in Italy that introduced a cap on top public sector salaries, leveraging unique matched employer-employee data and an event study design. Managers of public firms affected by the cap were, on average, 10 percentage points more likely to leave for a private sector job. Those who transitioned were significantly more productive than those who remained. Manager departures also increased the likelihood that their co-workers exited public employment—particularly among high-productivity individuals. We estimate that the reform resulted in a roughly 2 percent decline in public management productivity, while reducing public employment costs by only 0.1 percent.

This paper studies the effects of a hiring subsidy introduced in Italy in 2013 with the goal of stimulating female employment. We employ a staggered event-study design to investigate the dynamic effect of the subsidy on firm and worker outcomes, focusing in particular on hiring decisions. Results show that i) subsidized hires are more likely to remain employed at the firm in the long term, ii) firms that use the subsidy hire women with longer non-employment spells, including mothers and iii) subsidized hires are positively selected compared to the average hire at the firm. We argue that the subsidy could operate as a mechanism allowing firms to learn about the potential productivity of these female workers.