Gemma Dipoppa

University of Pennsylvania | UP · Department of Political Science

Repressive policies to fight criminal organizations are often met with a violent response from criminal groups. Are non-repressive strategies more effective? Targeting criminal revenues can be a powerful tool if the threat of investigation is credible and if criminals are unable to displace their activity to avoid controls. We study an Italian poli...

The widespread presence of criminal organizations in strong states presents a theoretical and empirical puzzle. How do criminal organizations — widely believed to thrive in weak states — expand to states with strong capacity? I argue that criminal groups expand where they can strike agreements with local actors for the provision of illegal resource...

This paper aims at providing an explanation of the observed espresso price dispersion across major Italian cities. We present some preliminary empirical evidence that suggests a positive relationships between the average espresso price in a city and the number of coffee shops (normalized for the adult population) operating in that city. The finding...

Organized crime uses political violence to influence politics in a wide set of countries. This paper exploits a novel dataset of attacks directed towards Italian local politicians to study how (and why) criminal organizations use violence against them. We test two complementary theories to predict the use of violence i) before elections, to affect...