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We study the effects of anti-competitive service regulation by examining whether OECD countries with less anti-competitive regulation see better economic performance in manufacturing industries that use less-regulated services more intensively. Our results indicate that lower service regulation increases value added, productivity and export growth in downstream service-intensive industries. The regulation of professional services and energy provision has particularly strong negative growth effects. Our estimates are robust to accounting for alternative forms of regulation (i.e. product and labour market regulation), alternative measures of financial development and a range of other specification checks.Do countries with less anti-competitive service regulation perform better economically? Policy makers appear to think so, as regulatory barriers have fallen in many countries, and their position is generally supported by a large empirical literature looking at the effects of entry barriers, red-tape costs or legal requirements on economic performance. Much of this literature examines the effects of regulation on the performance of the regulated sector. Less is known about the impacts on downstream manufacturing activities, which is surprising as regulation affects many key service inputs.In this article, we study how regulation in the supply of a variety of services affects the economic performance of downstream manufacturing industries. We do so by examining whether countries with less service regulation see faster value added, productivity and export growth in manufacturing industries using services more intensively (this methodology was pioneered for financial services by Rajan and Zingales, 1998). We measure service dependence across manufacturing industries using input-output account matrices. Our measures of service regulation are OECD indicators designed to capture anti-competitive regulatory settings for the energy sector (electricity and gas), the telecommunication and the transportation sectors and for professional services. These account for barriers to entry, for the integration between a priori competitive activities and natural monopolies (in the case of energy) and for the existence of restrictions on prices and fees, advertising or the form of business (in professional services).Our empirical findings indicate that lower service regulation has non-negligible positive effects on the value added, productivity and export growth rates of serviceintensive users. To get a sense for the size of the regulation effect, consider the annual value-added growth differential between an industry at the 75th percentile (Pulp, paper We are extremely grateful to Antonio Ciccone and Alfonso Rosolia for their help and suggestions. We thank Andrea Ichino, Tullio Jappelli, Giovanni Pica, Paolo Pinotti, Fabiano Schivardi, two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the Bank of Italy, University of Bologna, University of Cagliari, CSEF Salerno and MILLS 2007 for very useful comments. We are responsible for any mista...

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract. We examine the impact of natural disasters on economic growth by applying a synthetic control approach. In contrast to previous literature, we adopt a within-country perspective, which allows us to use richer and more comparable data and to better define the geographic area hit by the disaster. We examine two large-scale earthquakes that occurred in two different Italian regions in 1976 and 1980. According to our findings, the short-term effects are negligible in both regions, though they become negative if we simulate the GDP that would have been observed in absence of financial aid. In the longterm, the two regions show opposite effects on GDP per capita, largely reflecting different patterns of the TFP. These opposing outcomes are consistent with the idea that a quake (and related financial aid) might either increase technical efficiency via a disruptive creation mechanism or reduce it by stimulating corruption, distorting the markets and deteriorating social capital. We show that the latter case is more likely to occur in areas with lower pre-quake institutional quality. Moreover, institutional quality itself changes in response to the shock and these patterns are correlated to those of the TFP. Overall, our evidence suggests that natural disasters are likely to exacerbate regional differences in economic and social development. Terms of use: Documents in

Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon and encouraging tax compliance is an important and debated policy issue. Many studies have shown that tax cheating has to be attributed to a considerable extent to the tax morale of taxpayers. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the relationship between the taxpayer and the public sector; specifically, we investigate whether public spending inefficiency shapes individual tax morale. Combining data from Italian municipalities' balance sheets with individual data from a properly designed survey on tax morale, we find that the attitude towards paying taxes is better when resources are spent more efficiently. This evidence seems not to be driven by some confounding factor at the municipality level or by spatial sorting of citizens and proves robust to accounting for alternative measures of both inefficiency and tax morale. We also find that the negative effect of inefficiency is larger if the level of public spending is lower and/or the degree of fiscal autonomy is higher.