Revise & Resubmit
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Assets Confiscation, Harsh Imprisonment Regime, and Violence: On the Long-Run State-Mafia Interactions
Job Market Paper | R&R — Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization
Available on SSRN.
Presented at: University of Bologna; Bocconi University (CLEAN); ENS Lyon; KU Leuven; XIII NERI Workshop; XVI VPDE Workshop.
ABSTRACT
I develop a model analyzing the interplay between the state and mafias. I show that targeting criminal profitability reduces conflicts within criminal organizations but can increase retaliation against the state, while strengthening non-economic law enforcement decreases both. Using data on Italian mafias, I test these predictions by exploiting the introduction and staggered implementation of Italy’s asset forfeiture law and harsh imprisonment regime. Complementary instrumental-variable strategies exploit shocks to illegal profits, driven by U.S. drug demand and post-disaster public funds, and shocks to institutional integrity generated by municipal dissolutions for mafia infiltration. Together, the results highlight how different forms of repression reshape criminal violence.
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After the Draft: The Lasting Effects of Male Conscription on Well-Being
With Chiara Notarangelo
R&R — Economica
Presented at: University of Bologna; HERB Workshop; HEDGE 2026 Conference; XXXVIII SIEP Conference.
ABSTRACT
We study the effects of compulsory military service on mental health by exploiting the 2005 suspension of conscription in Italy. Using individual-level health survey data, we implement a regression discontinuity design around the birth-cohort cutoff separating the last conscripted cohort from the first fully exempted one. Men exposed to compulsory service report significantly worse psychological and mental health, are less likely to feel calm, and are more likely to smoke. These effects are robust across non-parametric, parametric, and discrete specifications, as well as to an extensive battery of placebo and falsification exercises across unaffected groups, age cohorts, and outcomes. We also provide evidence of relative comparison effects across adjacent cohorts, which may amplify –but do not fully account for– the observed discontinuities. We further document spillover effects within households: cohabiting relatives of exposed men exhibit lower psychological wellbeing and a higher propensity to smoke, consistent with stress transmission mechanisms. Finally, using data on causes of death from 2000 to 2021, a difference-in-differences design shows that suicide rates among young men aged 20–24 declined disproportionately in low-education provinces following the suspension of conscription. Since university students could defer service, the reform equalized exposure between students and non-students. Overall, even short-term compulsory service in peacetime generated persistent adverse effects on mental health and family wellbeing.
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Unsustainability Traps: Ubiquity of Prisoner’s Dilemma and Structural Policy Approaches Against Climate Change
With Piero Manfredi
R&R (second round, minor revisions) — Energy Economics
Presented at: XIV ESEE Conference; Macroeconomic Green Dynamics 2024.
ABSTRACT
Fighting global climate change calls for multiscale cooperative actions ensuring a rapid shift to globally “sustainable” paths. Drawing on the vast literature on free-riding in climate policies, we first define the main features of sustainability games and then develop a unified game-theoretic framework to investigate threats to cooperation across many different scales of economic interactions relevant to sustainability and test our predictions against individual-level ESS data. Unsustainability emerges pervasively, as interactions at all different levels ultimately yield prisoner’s dilemmas. Actions removing unsustainability at lower scales cannot prevent re-emergence at higher ones. On top of the hierarchy, namely between-country interactions, no structural intervention deters defection. Socio-economic inequalities worsen the picture: both poor and richest-rich agents, regardless of whether they are individuals or entire nations, are inevitably unsustainable. In particular, overconsuming countries force globalization to persistently trigger unsustainability. Our findings confirm the need for structural interventions to enhance climate policies targeting the mitigation of the socio-economic impact of climate change rather than its environmental effects per se, as well as the centrality of social sustainability and climate equity as fundamental policy targets of future phases.
Under Review
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The Quiet Payoff: Mafia Electoral Support and Policy Inaction
With Giovanni Righetto and Antonio Schiavone
Under review — Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics
Winner of the 2025 SIEP Prize. CESifo Working Paper.
Presented at: CESifo Workshop on Political Economy; Inter-American Development Bank; EEA Congress; Workshop on the Economics of Organized Crime; NICEP Conference; Bocconi University (CLEAN); SIEP Conference.
ABSTRACT
Organised crime groups often deliver electoral support to politicians, yet how they are rewarded remains unclear. Using data from Sicilian municipalities (1994–2022), we show that narrow wins by Forza Italia, Berlusconi’s party, are followed by sharp declines in the reallocation of confiscated Mafia assets, but only where the Mafia operates and only while the party governs. Exploiting historical variation in the Mafia’s vote-buying capacity, we find larger declines where that capacity was greater, and instrumenting party support with this proxy confirms a causal interpretation. We estimate the reward at €19–66 million of confiscated assets withheld from social reuse per legislature.
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The Democratic Costs of Lobbying: Policy Quality and Participation
With Giovanni Righetto and Antonio Schiavone
Under review — Games and Economic Behavior
Presented at: University of Bologna; Bocconi University (CLEAN); XVI NERI Workshop.
ABSTRACT
We develop a probabilistic-voting model to study how lobbying shapes both policy outcomes and democratic participation. A lobby supplies blocs of votes in exchange for weaker policy commitments, and we allow ideological voters to abstain when policies tilt too much toward lobby interests. The model predicts that stronger electoral competition can paradoxically degrade policy quality and depress turnout, as parties increasingly rely on lobby support to secure victory. We test these predictions in the context of Mafia lobbying in Sicily (1994–2018), where intensified competition coincides with weaker anti-Mafia enforcement and reduced voter participation.
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“Beeyond” Willingness To Pay: On the Perception of Honeybees’ Worth in the Italian Landscape
With Chiara Notarangelo
Under review — Environmental and Resource Economics
Presented at: Workshop on Climate Change and Ecological Behaviour (University of Florence); University of Bologna.
ABSTRACT
Can environmental damage undermine individuals’ willingness to pay for environmental protection? We develop a theoretical framework in which willingness to pay (WTP) decreases with perceived environmental damage, while increasing with wealth and altruism. In a strategic contribution setting, the effect of inequality on aggregate environmental provision depends on the substitutability of individual contributions, with altruism potentially offsetting its adverse effects. We examine these predictions using an original survey of Italian beekeepers and data from the European Social Survey. Combining self-reported environmental risks with exposure to the substantial losses affecting Italian honey production in 2019, we find that both perceived pathogen risks and economically relevant exposure to environmental shocks are associated with lower WTP among altruistic beekeepers. WTP is also positively associated with economic resources and negatively associated with regional inequality, while altruism attenuates the latter relationship. By contrast, greater support for general environmental protection policies is associated with higher WTP, a distinction also supported by the European Social Survey. Our findings suggest that environmental degradation may weaken willingness to finance mitigation, even as environmental concern increases, because realised environmental damage reduces the economic value of the asset or service that individuals would otherwise pay to preserve. This mechanism complements existing explanations of resistance to environmental policies by highlighting the economic losses generated by environmental degradation itself, rather than solely the costs of the ecological transition.
Other Working Papers and Research in Progress
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Cutting the Head or Trimming the Tail? Targeted Repression, Mafia Violence and Illegal Markets
With Piero Manfredi and Paolo Vanin
Invited book chapter in preparation for an edited volume on organized crime.
Presented at: University of Bologna; Universidad de San Andrés; Workshop of Tuscan Theorists; Queen Mary University of London.
ABSTRACT
We study the effects of targeted repression of organized crime on inter-clan violence and illegal activity. We investigate the possible trade-off between curbing violence and illegal activity. If clans fight for territorial control, targeting the strongest ones reduces violence, but if surviving clans are the most productive, it also boosts illegal activity and profits. Targeting the weakest clans has the opposite effects. If instead clans are able to sustain a peaceful territory-splitting agreement, targeting the strongest clans may raise violence by triggering a succession war. Conversely, targeting the weakest clans may allow the strongest ones to peacefully thrive. We discuss suggestive evidence from two prominent historical episodes. In Southern Italy, the expansion of the harsh imprisonment regime introduced in the early 1990s disproportionately affected members of weaker clans through information provided by whistle-blowers and was followed by a sharp decline in mafia-type homicides as well as an increase in drug-abuse deaths. In contrast, in Mexico, the large-scale decapitation strategy adopted during the War on Drugs often targeted dominant criminal organizations and coincided with a substantial escalation of inter-cartel violence.
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Organized Crime, Violence, and Targeted Repression
With Paolo Vanin
Presented at: University of Bologna; 10th Workshop on the Economics of Organized Crime; XXXVIII SIEP Conference.
ABSTRACT
How does the allocation of repression across criminal organizations affect violence and illegal activity? We develop a model in which competing clans can sustain peaceful market sharing through repeated interaction. Broad repression weakens clans more symmetrically, reducing their capacity to fight without altering their relative strength. Dominance-targeted repression instead concentrates enforcement on the strongest clan, combining incapacitation with a shift in the balance of power that can destabilize peaceful arrangements. We test these predictions using the sharp expansion of Italy’s Article 41-bis harsh-imprisonment regime in 1992. Mafia violence declines under both forms of repression, but more strongly under broad/nonselective repression, with effects concentrated in municipalities with pre-existing mafia activity. Drug- and overdose-related mortality also exhibits a delayed and persistent decline under broad/nonselective repression, consistent with a contraction in illegal-market activity. A complementary instrumental-variable strategy exploiting information from justice collaborators yields similar patterns. Our findings show that the effects of repression depend not only on the criminal capacity it removes, but also on how enforcement reshapes the balance of power among competing groups.
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Multiple Preferences, Single Choice: Mafia Monitoring and Electoral Control
With Ruben Durante and Antonio Schiavone
Presented at: Petralia Workshop 2026; 9th Institutions and Regional Development Conference.
ABSTRACT
We study how organized crime overcomes the enforcement problem of vote buying under the secret ballot. We argue that Italy’s pre-1991 multiple-preference electoral system gave criminal organizations a technology to verify compliance with their voting instructions, which the 1991 referendum then abolished. A simple theoretical framework predicts that weaker monitoring lowers support for parties relying on Mafia-controlled voting, raises violence, and increases turnout. Using newly digitized polling-station returns for Sicilian parliamentary elections, 1983–1992, we find that parties tied to Cosa Nostra relied disproportionately on multiple preferences. Municipalities with stronger pre-reform monitored voting then saw larger Christian Democratic losses, more homicides, and higher turnout, and later received more public spending in Mafia-vulnerable sectors under Forza Italia. Electoral monitoring is thus central to clientelistic and criminal exchange: changing the observability of the vote reshapes electoral outcomes and the long-run ties between organized crime, voters, and political power.
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Origins of Trust: Cultural Transmission and Selection into the Mafia
With Giovanni Mastrobuoni
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Cracking the Code: Assessing and Countering Mafia Penetration in Public Procurement
With Chiara Notarangelo
Finalist at the 2023 Tortuga Call for Policy Papers.
ABSTRACT
We use a game theory model to demonstrate that mafia influence discourages public investments in regions where criminal organizations have not yet permeated the legitimate economy. Conversely, in areas where organized crime has already entrenched itself, the presence of mafia is shown to foster investments as a strategic move to secure lucrative public contracts. This intriguing dichotomy forms a U-shaped association between regional wealth and mafia penetration. We test our theoretical predictions on a dataset of Sicilian municipalities. On the one hand, we find a negative correlation between mafia presence and public investments during the First Italian Republic (1946–1992), during which the mafia's sophistication level was insufficient to infiltrate the formal economy. On the other hand, we unveil a substantial allocation of resources from the Recovery fund (2020) to municipalities characterized by high mafia penetration. In both cases, we employ the existence of sulfur mines as an instrumental variable for assessing mafia presence. We then substantiate that the observed trend is also prevalent in areas formerly considered devoid of mafia presence. To address the recent problem of mafia penetration into public procurement, we propose PATMAPP, a novel index to evaluate the risk of mafia penetration for firms participating in calls for tenders.
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From Red to Scarlet: Political Violence Against the Communist Tide in the Italian Anomaly
Presented at: University of Bologna; Open University of Catalonia.
ABSTRACT
I investigate the hypothesis surrounding the strategy of tension in Italy during the 1970s. The prevailing thesis suggests that rogue elements within the state orchestrated a series of terrorist attacks and acts of political violence to counter the growing support for the Italian Communist Party (PCI)—the strongest communist party in the Western world—and to pave the way for an authoritarian shift with the backing of far-right organizations. Using a game-theoretic model and an empirical analysis based on a novel dataset of terrorist attacks and political violence—including detailed information on location, timing, and the political affiliation of both perpetrators and victims—I demonstrate a positive association between terrorism, victimization, and PCI support. To reinforce these findings, I exploit local exogenous shocks to PCI support driven by the international turmoil of 1968–69, which mobilized the working class and university students against the central government, leading to a sharper increase in PCI consensus in provinces where they were more concentrated. Finally, I provide empirical evidence suggesting that mafia-related violence against left-wing activists in Southern Italy served a similar purpose—and had similar effects—as far-right terrorism in the North.
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The Paradox of Power Play
Presented at: University of Bologna; ENS Lyon.
ABSTRACT
I model an asymmetric conflict and demonstrate that, under fairly general conditions, economically disadvantaged factions derive greater benefits from warfare, even when they neither outnumber nor surpass their opponents in military strength. This occurs because, although they are less likely to achieve victory, they stand to gain more and lose less from engaging in conflict. Extending the time horizon, I show that rising wealth inequality systematically increases the likelihood — not merely the incentive — for the poorer faction to initiate a dispute against the wealthier one. This dynamic creates a trade-off: while resource redistribution reduces the incentive for poorer factions to initiate conflict, it simultaneously raises the incentive for wealthier factions, resulting in an ambiguous net effect on the overall probability of war. I test the model’s key theoretical predictions using a comprehensive dataset of militarized interstate disputes spanning the past two centuries. To identify exogenous variation in GDP per capita differences, I exploit shocks to commodity prices and fluctuations in temperature and rainfall.