Search

In this paper we study the rise of the Sicilian mafia at the end of the 19th century and its impact on medium-term and long-term economic outcomes, state capacity and political competition. The new hypothesis, which we develop and empirically substantiate, is that the mafia’s expansion was triggered as a response to the rise of socialist peasant movements starting in 1893. Following the very severe drought and agrarian crisis, the Fasci dei Lavoratori spread among Sicilian peasants, who organized to demand better working conditions and higher wages, and landowners turn to the mafia to counter these movements. Exploiting differences in rainfall and drought intensity in 1893 as a source of variation across municipalities, we document a large response of peasant organizations and then the spread of the mafia within Sicily. The pattern we present is robust and does not exist when one focuses on rainfall or drought variation in other years, bolstering the case that this corresponds to a specific causal channel working only in the context of the expansion of these peasant organizations. Using drought intensity in 1893 as an instrument for mafia in the early 1900s, we then investigate the impact of the mafia on educational outcomes in 1900s, long-term political competition and long-term economic outcomes. Our results indicate a sizable impact of the mafia on literacy in the medium-term, and very large impact on political competition, exhibiting itself by municipalities in which mayoral candidates run without opposition, and also long-term impacts on education and income extending into the decades following World War II.

While folk theorems for dynamic renewable common pool resource games sustain cooperation as an equilibrium, the possibility of reverting to violence to appropriate the resource destroys the incentives to cooperate, because of the expectation of conflict when resources are sufficiently depleted. In this paper, we provide experimental evidence that individuals behave according to the theoretical predictions. For high stocks of resources, when conflict is a highly costly activity, participants cooperate less than in the control group, and they play the non-cooperative action with higher frequency. This comes as a consequence of the (correct) anticipation that, when resources run low, the conflict option is used by a large share of participants.

We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader's ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime light intensity as output measure to capture the distributive effects of a wide range of policies. We find robust evidence for ethnic favoritism: the political leaders' ethnographic regions enjoy 10% higher nighttime light intensity. We further find that ethnic favoritism is a global rather than Sub-Saharan African phenomenon, which is present in poor as well as rich countries; that political institutions have a weak effect on ethnic favoritism; that ethnic favoritism is most prevalent in ethnically fractionalized and segregated countries with long established polities; and that ethnic favoritism does not contribute to sustainable development.

We examine the impact of a different cultural background on individual behavior, focusing on penalties in football matches of southern European and northern European football players in the English Premier League. Southern European football players collect on average more football penalties than their British colleagues and northern European football players collect on average less football penalties than their British colleagues. The number of football penalties incurred by southern European players is initially higher but converges towards the local average the longer their experience in the English Premier League. ispartof: Journal of Sports Economics vol:16 issue:5 pages:508-530 status: published

We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader’s ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime light intensity as output measure to capture the distributive effects of a wide range of policies. We find robust evidence for ethnic favoritism: the political leaders’ ethnographic regions enjoy 10% higher nighttime light intensity. We further find that ethnic favoritism is a global rather than Sub-Saharan African phenomenon, which is present in poor as well as rich countries; that political institutions have a weak effect on ethnic favoritism; that ethnic favoritism is most prevalent in ethnically fractionalized and segregated countries with long established polities; and that ethnic favoritism does not contribute to sustainable development.

Civil wars inflict considerable development costs. Understanding the relative fragility of certain segments of the population is a necessary condition to build resilience to ongoing and future violence outbreaks. This paper documents the impact of the violent civil war affecting the Democratic Republic of Congo in the period 1997–2004 on infant mortality. It adopts an instrumental variable approach to correct for the nonrandom timing and location of conflict events using mineral price index variations by district, taking account of the mineral locations and prices, as instrument. Strong and robust evidence, including mother fixed effects regressions comparing siblings, shows that conflict significantly increases girl mortality. The paper also examines the mechanisms explaining this phenomenon, with a focus on disentangling the behavioral from the biological factors. The analysis suggests that gender imbalances in infant mortality are driven by the selection induced by a higher vulnerability of boys in utero rather than by gender discrimination. ispartof: IFPRI Discussion Paper 1374 pages:1-44 status: published

This paper documents the impact of civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo on infant mortality between 1997 and 2004. It adopts an instrumental variable approach to correct for the non-random timing and location of conflict. Strong and robust evidence, including mother fixed effects regressions, shows that conflict significantly increases girl mortality. It also examines the mechanisms explaining this phenomenon, with a focus on disentangling the behavioral from the biological factors. The analysis suggests that gender imbalances in infant mortality are driven by the selection induced by a higher vulnerability of boys in utero rather than by gender discrimination.

We examine the impact of a different cultural background on individual behavior, focusing on violence on the football field of southern European and nothern European football players in the English Premier League. We find that southern European football players collect on average more football penalties than their nothern European colleagues. We also find that the initially higher number of football penalties incurred by southern European players converges towards the local average, the longer their experience in the Premier League.

We show that firmed conflict affects social capital as measured by trust and associational membership. Using the case of Uganda and two rounds of nationally representative individual-level data bracketing a large number of battle events, we find that self-reported generalized trust and associational membership decreased during the conflict in districts in which battle events took place. Exploiting the different timing of two distinct waves of violence, we provide suggestive evidence for a rapid recovery of social capital. Evidence from a variety of identification strategies, including difference-in-difference and instrumental variavle estimates, suggest that these relationships are causal.