PhD Candidate in Political Economy, Political Science and Political Economy Group, Department of Government, LSE
Contact details
Email: n.mastrorocco@lse.ac.uk
Phone number: +44 (0)75 352 12757
Room number: CON 7.03
Address: Department of Government || London School of Economics and Political Science || Houghton Street || London WC2A 2AE
Research interests
Primary Fields: Political Economy
Secondary Fields: Applied Microeconomics
Job Market Paper
Organised Crime, Captured Politicians and the Allocation of Public Resources (joint with Marco Di Cataldo)
Abstract
What is the impact of organised crime on the allocation of public resources and on tax collection? This paper studies the consequences of collusion between members of criminal organisations and politicians in Italian local governments. In order to capture the presence of organised crime, we exploit the staggered enforcement of a national law allowing for dissolution of a municipal government upon evidence of collusion between elected officials and the mafia. We measure the consequences of this collusion by using newly collected data on public spending, local taxes and elected politicians at the local level. Differences-in-differences estimates reveal that infiltrated local governments not only spend more on average on construction and waste management and less on police enforcement, but also collect fewer fiscal revenues. In addition, we uncover key elements of local elections associated with mafia-government collusion. In particular, Regression Discontinuity estimates show that infiltration is more likely to occur when right-wing parties win local elections.
Additional Paper
News Media and Crime Perceptions: Evidence from a Natural Experiment. Joint with Luigi Minale (under review American Economic Journal, Applied Microeconomics)