Giorgio Bellettini

University of Bologna | UNIBO · Department of Economics DSE

In many democracies, gender differences in voter turnout have narrowed or even reversed. Yet, it appears that women participate more in some circumstances and men in others. Here we study how life trajectories – specifically, marriage and having children – will impact male and female turnout differently, depending on household-level context. To thi...

In many democracies, voter turnout is higher among the rich than the poor. But do changes in income lead to changes in electoral participation? We address this question with unique administrative data matching a decade of individual tax records with voter rolls in a large municipality in northern Italy. We document several important findings. First...

We model a society that values coherence between the long-term commitment of politicians to given levels of public good provision and current policy. In that context, we suggest a novel mechanism by which issuing government debt can affect electoral results. Debt is exploited by an incumbent politician who favors a low level of public good supply,...

We exploit a unique panel dataset merging data on individual socio-economic characteristics and individual turnout in an Italian municipality to investigate the relationship between ethnic diversity in residential neighborhoods and propensity to vote. Using these data, we document for the first time a differential effect of diversity on electoral t...

We perform an empirical analysis to investigate the relationship between income inequality and the occurrence of banking crises on a panel of 33 advanced countries in the period 1970–2011. Differently from other empirical studies, we focus on levels rather than growth rates of income inequality. We find a statistically significant and positive rela...

The degree of intergenerational altruism is estimated in a benchmark Barro-type OLG framework with imperfect altruism, exploiting the exogenous variation generated by reforms of the tax treatment of bequests and inter vivos real estate donations enacted in Italy between 2000 and 2001. Using longitudinal information on the housing stock and house pr...

We perform an empirical analysis to investigate how neighborhood heterogeneity affects electoral turnout. To this end, we rely on a unique dataset on local elections in an Italian municipality, which merges information on socio-economic characteristics of about 370.000 individuals with turnout data for 434 electoral precincts in 2004 and 2009. Expl...

We use a political economy model of Schumpeterian growth with entry to investigate how an incumbent politician can strategically use the level of red tape to acquire incumbency advantage. By setting sufficiently high red tape, the politician induces the incumbent firm in the intermediate sector to invest in political connections, which are valued a...

We identify the degree of intergenerational altruism in an OLG framework à la Barro exploiting the quasi-experimental variation generated by reforms of bequest taxation (estate or inheritance tax, in the U.S.) and taxes on inter vivos real estate donations (gift tax, in the U.S.) that were enacted in Italy between 2000 and 2001. Employing a unique...

This paper is an empirical investigation into the effect of bequest taxes (estate or inheritance tax, in the US) and inter vivos real estate donations taxes (gift tax, in the US) on (i) house prices, (ii) house donations, and (iii) market transactions. In a simple model with intergenerational altruism, a lower tax rate unambiguously increases (i) a...

Using data for a panel of 62 partly to fully democratic countries in the period 1984–2008, we provide evidence that political persistence (measured as the longest tenure in office of main political entities) is negatively associated with growth, after controlling for country and time fixed effects, and that this association is stronger in countries...

Differently from Atkinson and Morelli (2011) who detect no clear link between increases in income inequality and systemic banking crises, we show that a large majority of crises occurred between 1982 and 2008 have been preceded by persistently high levels of income inequality. Such association is robust when considering Gini values for incomes afte...

We empirically investigate whether the persistence of politicians in political institutions affects the innovation activity of …firms. We use 12,000 …firm-level observation from three waves of the Italian Observatory over Small and Medium Enterprises, and introduce a measure of political persistence de…ned as the average length of individual politi...

Using data on a panel of 56 democratic countries in the period 1975-2004, we find evidence of a negative association between political stability and economic growth which is stronger and empirically more robust in countries with high bureaucratic costs. Motivated by these results, which contrast with previous contributions, we develop a model of gr...

Given falling birth rates, ageing baby boomers approaching retirement age as well as a pension crisis in most advanced economies, understanding the characteristics of the labour supply function of the elderly have taken on a new significance. Even in developing countries, with labour surplus economies, this is a major issue as these poor countries...

This paper studies the determinants of immigration policy in an economy with entrepreneurs and workers where a trade union has market power over wages. The presence of the union induces a social welfare maximizing government to implement a high level of immigration, leading to a welfare loss not only from an aggregate point of view but also from th...

In this paper, we tackle the issue of locating a public facility which provides a public good in a closed and populated territory. This facility generates differentiated benefits to neighborhoods depending on their distance from it. In the case of a Nimby facility, the smaller is the distance, the lower is the individual benefit. The opposite is tr...

This paper sheds light on the relationship between income inequality and redistributive policies and provides possible guidance in the specification of empirical tests of such a relationship. We model a two-period economy where capital markets are imperfect and agents vote over the level of taxation to finance redistributive policies that enhance f...

This paper investigates the effects of immigration quotas on the average quality of immigrants by developing a human capital migration model where efficiency in migration depends on skills and emigration rates are higher among skilled workers. Studying the joint determination of the domestic level of wages and immigrants' self-selection, we find a...

We study the interaction between technological innovation, investment in human capital and child labour. In a two-stage game, first firms decide on innovation, then households decide on education. In equilibrium the presence of inefficient child labour depends on parameters related to technology, parents' altruism and the diffusion of firms' proper...

This paper studies the determinants of immigration policy in an economy with entrepreneurs and workers where a trade union has monopoly power over wages. The presence of the union leads a benevolent government to implement a high level of immigration and induces a welfare loss not only from an aggregate point of view, but even from the point of vie...

We study an OLG economy where productivity growth comes from two alternative sources: process innovation and learning-by-doing. There is a trade-off between the two in so far as frequent technological updates reduce the scope for learning on existing technologies. A conflict is shown to arise between the young and the old, because the former favour...

This paper provides an explanation for the existence of child labour which relies on the imperfect enforcement of compulsory schooling laws. In the presence of complementarities in the production of human capital that justify legislative intervention, mandatory measures ensure that coordination failures are solved so that all parents send their chi...

To study the political economy of immigration, we develop a common agency model where a trade union and a lobby of entrepreneurs offer contributions to the government to influence its decision on how many immigrants can enter the domestic economy. In the political equilibrium, anticipating that the union will use its power to raise the wage rate ab...

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 fi...

This paper investigates the economic consequences of international migration from the point of view of destination countries. Consistently with international evidence on migration flows, we build a model where the migration rate is higher among the highly-educated. A negative relationship is shown to exist between the domestic wage level and the pe...

We study the interactions between technological innovation, investment in human capital and child labor. In our setting new technologies require new skills and new skills can be developed only through schooling. In a two-stage game, first firms decide on innovation, then households decide on education. In equilibrium the presence of inefficient chi...

We analyze under which conditions temporary migration of unskilled and skilled workers increases human capital accumulation in the host country. We also show that the negative welfare effect of lower unskilled wages may be counterbalanced by deeper human capital formation.

In this paper, we analyse the empirical relationship between social security expenditure and economic growth, using cross-country data for a sample of 61 countries and panel data for a sample of 20 industrialized countries. We find that, whenever a statistically significant association between social security expenditure and growth exists, it has a...

Using an endogenous growth model in which countries differ with respect to property rights protection, the paper analyzes the growth and welfare effects of removing capital controls, and studies the political support for a reform which improves the quality of property rights. When these are poorly protected, liberalization of capital movements may...

The recession in the United States in the wake of the global financial crisis has had a pronounced negative impact on developing Asia’s exports and growth. As a result, developing Asian countries are increasingly looking to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a new source of demand and growth. The central objective of this paper is to empirical...

This paper develops a model of endogenous growth with overlapping generations to investigate the joint determination of social security, public investment and growth in a small open economy. We show that a pure pay-as-you-go-system with indexed to wages benefits provides the taxpayers with the incentives to support growth-oriented policies, which i...

We study an OLG economy where productivity growth comes from two alternative sources: process innovation and learning-by-doing. There is a trade-off between the two in so far as frequent technological updates reduce the scope for learning on existing technologies. A conflict is shown to arise between the young and the old, because the former favour...

This paper associates political instability with real shocks affecting the income of the median voter, in a two-period model where two political parties set redistribution in order to defend the interests of well-defined constituencies. Current policies affect future voting outcomes and an intertemporal trade-off arises for the parties since their...

IJH=?J This paper associates political instability to real shocks a®ecting the income of the median voter, in a two-period model where two political parties set redistribution in order to defend the interests of well-de¯ned constituencies. Implemented policies a®ect future voting outcomes and an intertemporal trade-o® arises for the parties since t...

Under fairly general assumptions, we show that when the effects of union behavior on the alternative wage are taken into account, the union loses its bargaining power. This result casts some doubts on the usefulness of traditional right-to-manage models for welfare and policy analysis.

We develop a model of Schumpeterian growth where political connections with long-term politicians can be exploited by low-quality producers to defend their monopoly position and prevent innovation and entry of high-quality competitors. Through per-sonal relationship developed with the incumbent politicians, connected …rms are able to reduce bureauc...

Using data on a panel of 56 democratic countries in the period 1975-2004, we find evidence of a negative association between political stability and economic growth which is stronger and empirically more robust in countries with high bureaucratic costs. Motivated by these results, which contrast with previous contributions, we develop a model of gr...