My work and future plans
Publication
The long-term effect of colonial state capacity: Evidence from Central India, 2023
Current working paper
Past reports
Do the angy vote more? Inequality and turnout in the 2016 American election, 2020
Is stability in core inflation structural? An estimation within the Euro Area, 2017
Research stream
My main areas of expertise are political economy, development economics and economic history.
My research agenda deals with the analysis of the mutual relations of political institutions and markets, in order to answer questions pertaining to the origin of growth in capitalist societies.
In my first artcile, I focus on Central India, where the river Narmada separates two regions that have been ruled by different types of government only during the colonial period, and for reasons independent of their initial economic development. I implement a spatial RDD on village population in the Nineteenth Century as well as in 1901, and I run the same model on proxies of welfare in 2015. My results highlight that divergence has realised where the river overlapped with the colonial border, but not in a neighbouring area where the same Narmada River separates two shores with the same type of former colonial institution. I discuss the following transmission mechanism. The treated group was directly administered by the British with more modern state tools – such as the enforcement of property rights and a transparent taxation system – that made it easier to develop private investment. The most prominent example is the mixed-capital enterprise in charge of the construction of the first trans-continental railway. Infrastructure endowment seems to be crucial for the long-term transmission of the colonial institutional characteristics to the outcomes measured in 2015, which show better average welfare outcomes, as well as higher wealth inequality in the treated group. My work provides an explanation of how the improvement in the quality of the institutions of an embryonic state may sustain the growth of the local markets it deems relevant.
In a second working paper, I propose the following question: Does leaving too much discretion to political decision-makers result in a strategic usage of public revenues? Under certain circumstances, Italian public offices can appoint temporary employees bypassing the standard procedure that requires public competition. The 2020 pandemic shock led first to the deferral of seven scheduled regional elections, and then to the announcement of a new election date. I estimate a DID model with time-varying ATTs and wild bootstrapping of the standard errors. My results are robust to a different estimation strategy (RDD) and model specification, and show a sharp negative effect of the deferral on the percentage of employees hired by the regions where they were born. However, this effect is only specific to the time period immediately following the deferral, and vanishes as soon as the new election date is announced. Therefore, it seems that an adaptation strategy to the new course of the political events has been in place in the treated group. As only residents can vote in regional ballots,
my finding suggests that – in the proximity of an election – incumbents may tailor discretionary public expenditures towards people that are ex-ante more likely to be pivotal.