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• We investigate the existence of an 'electoral cycle bias' in media reporting. • We consider the timing of media coverageof news about corruption scandals in Italy. • We analyze how the regional electoral cycles influence coverage of corruption news. • We find evidence of a 'partisan electoral cycle' for different newspapers. We investigate the existence of an 'electoral cycle bias' in the timing of media coverage of news with high political salience. In particular, we analyze how the electoral cycles at the regional level influence the coverage of news about corruption scandals in the Italian Regional Health Systems by two important national newspapers having opposite ideology, La Repubblica (left-wing oriented) and Il Giornale (right-wing oriented). Our findings show that Il Giornale significantly increases the number of articles about corruption scandals involving left-wing politicians since eight weeks before the elections, while it reduces the number of those about episodes of corruption without any political connection. On the contrary, La Repubblica increases the number of articles about episodes involving right-wing politicians only between four to eight weeks before the elections and it decreases those about no political episodes just the week right before them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a “natural experiment”, the fiscal adjustment of Italy in the 1990s to meet the Maastricht criteria, to test a simple model of soft budget constraint that closely resembles the intergovernmental relationships in the Italian public health care sector. We show that the link between the ex-ante financing by the Central government and the health expenditure by regions was stronger when regional expectations of future bailing outs were presumably lower. Confirming previous research, we also prove that more fiscally autonomous regions were more financially responsible and that a political “alignment” effect was present, with “friendly” regional governments controlling more expenditure than unfriendly ones. Our results suggest that, at least in Italy, bailing out expectations by regions may be the missing variable emphasised by [Culyer A.J., 1988. Health care expenditures in Canada: Myth and reality. Canadian Tax Papers, 82] for empirical models explaining health expenditure. Our results also raise some worries about the outcome of the current decentralization process in Europe. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we provide an estimate of the impact of money laundering on residential house market prices. The housing market is commonly exploited by criminal organizations to clean illegal profits. The increase in demand due to money laundering contrasts the negative externality of crime on house prices, which has been investigated by a large literature. We build a new dataset on residential house prices at the provincial level in Italy over the period 2005–2012, obtaining a sample of 672 observations. We then estimate a hedonic equilibrium price model, controlling for proxies both for illegal profits derived from "entrepreneurial" crimes (drug dealing, receiving stolen goods, prostitution) and for violent crimes (extortions), together with traditional market drivers. Adding to the evidence from the traditional literature, which remarks the negative impact of crime on house prices, our findings suggest that money laundering from "entrepreneurial" crimes creates an upward distortion in the housing market prices. The impact is stronger where retail markets for illicit trades are richer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pandemic in Italy and Spain Italy and Spain share common institutional backgrounds (e.g. decentralized healthcare systems), but adopted a different model of governance during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic ([5]). Comparing the reactions to the pandemic in two countries (Italy and Spain) allows us to study whether hierarchical centralization in Spain fared better than informal decentralized coordination implemented in Italy. Nonetheless, the institutional design of the health system to address the needs of the COVID-19 pandemic was corrected in the second wave of the pandemic, when Spain followed Italy's lead and kept the pandemic governance decentralized. Results (not reported here for brevity) confirm a higher concentration of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy than in Spain, which implies that centralized governance allows for more homogeneous outcomes across regions, while a decentralized solution allows to identify best practices from those regions that have adopted unsuccessful choices. [Extracted from the article]

Noninvasive prenatal screening tests help identify genetic disorders in a fetus, but their take-up remains low in several countries. Using a regression discontinuity design, we test the causal effect of a policy that eliminated co-payments for noninvasive screening tests in Italy. We identify the treatment effects by a discontinuity in women's eligibility for a free test based on their conception date. We find that the policy increases the probability of women's undergoing noninvasive screening tests by 5.5 percentage points, and the effect varies by socioeconomic status. We do not find evidence of substitution effects with more expensive and riskier invasive diagnostic tests. In addition, the increase in take-up does not affect pregnancy termination or newborn health. We find some evidence of positive effects on mothers' health behaviors during pregnancy as measured by reductions in mothers' weight gain and hospital admissions during pregnancy, but these are statistically significant only at the 10 percent level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]