We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we nd that municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive larger transfers per capita. Exploiting variation in birthplaces induced by parliamentary turnover for estimation, we nd that this e ect is driven by legislators who were born in a town outside their district of election. As a result, we argue that our ndings cannot be a consequence of re-election incentives, the usual motivation for pork-barrel policies in the literature. Rather, politicians may be pursuing other personal motives. In line with this hypothesis, we nd that the birth town bias essentially disappears when legislative elections are near. We explore several possible mechanisms behind our results by matching parliamentarians to a detailed dataset on local level administrators.
This paper revisits the debate around the link between population density and the severity of COVID-19 spread in the USA. We do so by conducting an empirical analysis based on graphical evidence, regression analysis and instrumental variable strategies borrowed from the agglomeration literature. Studying the period between the start of the epidemic and the beginning of the vaccination campaign at the end of 2020, we find that the cross-sectional relationship between density and COVID-19 deaths changed as the year evolved. Initially, denser counties experienced more COVID-19 deaths. Yet, by December, the relationship between COVID deaths and urban density was completely flat. This is consistent with evidence indicating density affected the timing of the outbreak—with denser locations more likely to have an early outbreak—yet had no influence on time-adjusted COVID-19 cases and deaths. Using data from Google, Facebook, the US Census and other sources, we investigate potential mechanisms behind these findings.
We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we nd that municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive larger transfers per capita. Exploiting variation in birthplaces induced by parliamentary turnover for estimation, we nd that this e ect is driven by legislators who were born in a town outside their district of election. As a result, we argue that our ndings cannot be a consequence of re-election incentives, the usual motivation for pork-barrel policies in the literature. Rather, politicians may be pursuing other personal motives. In line with this hypothesis, we nd that the birth town bias essentially disappears when legislative elections are near. We explore several possible mechanisms behind our results by matching parliamentarians to a detailed dataset on local level administrators.
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