The Italian civil war and the Nazi occupation of Italy occurred at a critical juncture, just before the birth of a new democracy and when, for the first time in a generation, Italians were choosing political affliations and forming political identities. In this paper we study how these traumatic events …

We study the effect of negative advertising in electoral races with more than two candidates with a large scale field experiment.

Transfer cuts at the central level might translate into higher local taxes, changing the effective composition of the fiscal adjustment.

We look at measures of liberalization in international trade, agriculture, network industries, and financial markets. We find that, after a financial crisis, democracies neither open nor close their economy.

Theory predicts that the majoritarian electoral system should produce more targeted redistribution and lower politicians’ rents than proportional representation.

We evaluate the impact of timing on decision outcomes when both the timing and the relevant decision are chosen under uncertainty. Sports betting provides the testing ground, as we exploit an original dataset containing more than one million online bets on games of the Italian Major Soccer League.

In many countries, important features of municipal government depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds.

We compare single round vs runoff elections under plurality rule, allowing for partly endogenous party formation.

This paper studies the different patterns of political selection in majoritarian versus proportional systems.