We explore how electoral rules and cultural traits (namely, the degree of civicness) interact in shaping elected officials' behaviour. We use a dataset that includes the expenditure proposals sponsored by members of the Italian Senate from 1993 to 2012 (as well as other individual and district characteristics) and exploit the 2005 electoral reform that transformed a mainly majoritarian system into a proportional one. As a first step, we can confirm previous empirical findings: legislators elected in first-past-the-post districts show a higher propensity to sponsor locally-oriented bills and to put effort into legislative activity than those elected with a closed-list proportional system. More importantly, however, we find that the effects of the change in the electoral rules are muted in areas with a high degree of civicness. We also propose a simple theoretical probabilistic voting model with altruistic preferences that is able to rationalize this finding.

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The paper uses questions included in the 2010 wave of the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth to investigate the role of family transmission of values. It presents three main empirical findings. First, the paper shows that a number of attitudes (generalized and personalized trusting behaviour, risk and time preferences) and outcomes (female labour force participation, fertility, entrepreneurship, productivity) are associated with the values received. Second, it documents that values received from parents are correlated with the values transmitted to descendants. Third, by using respondent moving patterns, the paper highlights that values received are slowly changing even after a discontinuity in the reference environment. Comparisons between first-and second-generation movers suggest that what matters for breaking the family chains are the formative years, when young people somehow strike a balance between the values transmitted by their parents and what they experience in the (possibly different) environment where they grow up.

Total factor productivity (TFP) explains the bulk of the differences in income level across territories. A major policy issue refers to the ability of place‐based policy to promote TFP growth in backward areas. We investigate the effect of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) on local TFP growth in Southern Italy between 2007 and 2015. By using different empirical models (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) cross‐section, panel fixed‐effect regressions and a spatial regression discontinuity design), we show that, on average, local TFP seems to be rather unresponsive to EU programmes. Some suggestive evidence of a positive effect is found for ERDF infrastructure investments and for the areas characterized by higher institutional quality and population density.

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