Dynamics of urban growth: Italy, 1951–2011

The electoral migration cycle

“…Finally, in the 3,201 contested elections held in 2014, the mean and median win margins were 23.1% and 16.6% of the votes. Overall, the win margin was less than 3 percentage points in 10% of the elections, it was less than 11 2 percentage points in 5% of the elections, and it was less than 0.3 percentage points in about 1% of the elections. Almost 30 races in those three election waves ended in exact ties and required supplementary rounds.…”

“…While average annual per capita spending on municipal public services amounts to about euro 1,200, or almost 5% of GDP, the inter-municipal variance in the range and quality of services provided is enormous, particularly as far as welfarerelated expenditures are concerned. In fact, EU, state and regional grants only cover about 1 3 of spending on local welfare services, leaving municipal governments an ample degree of discretion. For instance, childcare services having a crucial role in female labour force participation according to the o¢ cial Europe 2020 headline target strategies vary dramatically across municipalities, with a rate of formal enrollment of children aged 0-3 into nurseries ranging from less than 5% to over 50%, and municipal spending per child from less than euro 100 to over euro 3,000 (ISTAT, 2016).…”

“…For instance, childcare services having a crucial role in female labour force participation according to the o¢ cial Europe 2020 headline target strategies vary dramatically across municipalities, with a rate of formal enrollment of children aged 0-3 into nurseries ranging from less than 5% to over 50%, and municipal spending per child from less than euro 100 to over euro 3,000 (ISTAT, 2016). Similarly, while Italian municipalities spend on aggregate over half-billion euro per year on policies aimed at …ghting poverty and social exclusion, less than half authorities o¤er a domiciliary social assistance service, and only about 1 4 of them have a formal youth training and subsidised employment program (ANCI, 2016). Indeed, this suggests that the impact of municipal policies -in particular the structure, variety and intensity of welfare services -on the quality of life of households and on their location decisions can be substantial.…”

“…In fact, the rare circumstances where the provision of local public goods changes exogenously in a quasi-experimental setting are increasingly seen as the ideal conditions for testing the key predictions of the Tiebout model in terms of capitalization of public amenities into property values and strati…cation of communities via direct migratory responses. 1 Banzhaf and Walsh (2008) use a di¤erence-in-di¤erences approach to test whether the entry and exit of polluting facilities have an impact on population density (through the number of individuals leaving and entering a community) and mean incomes (changing mix between richer and poorer households) of evenly-spaced 'constructed'neighborhoods in California, and …nd evidence of out-migration and impoverishment of communities when the public good air quality deteriorates. Chay and Greenstone (2005) and Greenstone and Gallagher (2008) use quasi-experimental approaches to evaluate the welfare impact of mandated federal environmental policies on US local governments, and provide evidence of capitalization of environmental quality 1 Epple and Sieg (1999), Epple et al (2001) and Sieg et al (2004) estimate general equilibrium models of sorting across a …nite number of …xed-boundary communities where endogeneity of community-speci…c amenities arises because the unobserved component of local public goods might be correlated with housing prices and household expenditures, and use functions of the income rank of communities as instruments.…”

“…The panel dataset includes the same 7,000 continental Italy's municipalities studied above, but it spans through over a decade (years 2002-2014), for a total of almost 90,000 annual observations on internal migration ‡ows and municipal …scal policy instruments. The time period considered here saw the Italian economy move from moderate economic growth in the early 2000s to a deep and prolonged recession during the late 2000s and the early 2010s, and the average annual internal migration rates show a moderate increase over the decade, from below 2.5% to close to 3%.First, in order to verify if the pattern of election-driven migration that was observed on monthly data emerges on annual data too, table 8 reports the results of estimation of reduced-form out-migration and in-migration equations (equation (2) below) in a similar spirit as the monthly-level equation(1). Given the …ve-years electoral term, the municipalities in this dataset face two to three elections during the period of observation (table 1), and equation(2) lets the yearly percentage rate of out-migration (subsequently, in-migration) from (to) locality i to (from) any other Italian locality in year t (M it ) be a function of the distance of year t from the year of the next election in locality i (d it ):…”