Working papers results

A well functioning bureaucracy can promote prosperity, as Max Weber maintained. But when bureaucracy gets jammed-a Kafkian situation-it causes stagnation. We propose a dynamic theory of the interaction between legislation and the efficiency of bureaucracy. When bureaucracy is inefficient, the effects of politicians' legislative acts are hard to assess. Incompetent politicians thus have strong incentives of passing laws to acquire the reputation of skillful reformers. But a plethora of often contradictory laws can itself lead to a collapse in bureaucratic efficiency. This interaction can spawn both Weberian and Kafkian steady states. A temporary surge in political instability, which increases the likelihood of a premature end of the legislature, exerts pressure for reforms, or results in the appointment of short-lived technocratic governments can determine a permanent shift towards the nightmare Kafkian steady state. The aggregate experience of Italy in its transition from the so-called First to the Second Republic fits the narrative of the model quite well. Using micro-data for Italian MPs, we also provide evidence consistent with the claim that when political instability is high, politicians signal their competence through legislative activism, which leads to the overproduction of laws and norms.

We define as populist a party that champions short-term protection policies while hiding their long-term costs by using anti-elite rhetoric to manipulate beliefs. We provide a framework that rationalizes this definition and generates sharp implications for people support to populist platforms (the demand side), for the timing of appear ance of populist parties and their chosen orientation (the supply side) as well as for non-populist parties response to populist success (an equilibrium market reaction). Using individual data on voting in European countries we document that key fea tures of the demand for populism as well as the supply heavily depend on turnout incentives, previously neglected in the populism literature. Once turnout effects are properly taken into account, economic insecurity drives consensus to populist policies directly as well as through indirect negative effects on trust and attitudes towards migrants. On the supply side, populist parties are more likely to emerge and prosper when countries deal with systemic economic insecurity crisis that both left-oriented incumbent parties (relying on government-based policies) and right-oriented (relying on markets) find hard to address, disappointing voters who lose faith in them and abstain. Relative entry space determines the orientation choice of populist parties, i.e., whether they enter on left or right of the political spectrum. The typical non-populist party policy response is to reduce the distance of their platform from that of new populist entrants, thereby magnifying the aggregate supply of populist policies.

This paper proposes an integrated simple theory of bargaining and conflict between ethnic groups, delivering novel predictions on secessionist versus centrist conflict, and confronting them to the data. We find that greater size of the opposition ethnic groups reduces the likelihood of peaceful union with respect to secessionist and centrist conflict, and that cultural preference similarity decreases the risk of secessionist conflict with respect to centrist conflict and with respect to union. Finally, we show that greater patience increases the likelihood of secessionist conflict with respect to centrist conflict.

Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains.
What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? We match data on notable
individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical city data.
The production and attraction of creative talent is associated with city institutions that protected economic and political freedoms and promoted local autonomy. Instead, indicators of local economic conditions such as city size and real wages, do not predict creative clusters. We also show that famous creatives are spatially concentrated and clustered across disciplines, that their spatial mobility has remained stable over the centuries, and that creative clusters are persistent but less than population.

We consider a game with sequential moves played by agents who are randomly drawn from large populations and matched. We assume that, when players are uncertain about the strategy distributions of the opponents, preferences over actions at any information set admit a smooth-ambiguity representation in the sense of Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (Econometrica, 2005). This may induce dynamically inconsis- tent preferences and calls for an appropriate definition of sequential best response. We take this into account in our analysis of self-confirming equilibrium (SCE) and rationalizable SCE in sequential games with feedback played by agents with non-neutral ambiguity attitudes. Battigalli, Cerreia-Vioglio, Maccheroni, and Marinacci (Amer. Econ. Rev., 2015) show that the set of SCE's of a simultaneous-move game with feedback expands as ambiguity aversion increases. We show by example that SCE in a sequential game is not equivalent to SCE applied to the strategic form of such game, and that the previous monotonicity result does not extend to general sequential games. Still, we provide sufficient conditions under which the monotonicity result holds for (rationalizable) SCE.

The Wold decomposition of a weakly stationary time series extends to the multivariate case by allowing each entry of a weakly stationary vectorial process to linearly depend on the components of a vector of shocks. Since univariate coefficients are replaced by matrices, we propose a modelling approach based on Hilbert A-modules defined over the algebra of squared matrices. The Abstract Wold Theorem for Hilbert A-modules, that we prove, delivers two orthogonal decompositions of vectorial processes: the Multivariate Classical Wold Decomposition, which exploits the lag operator as isometry, and the Multivariate Extended Wold Decomposition, where a scaling operator is employed. The latter enables us to disentangle the heterogeneous levels of persistence of a weakly stationary vectorial process. Hence, the persistent components of the macro-financial variables into consideration are related to the overlapping of different sources of randomness with specific persistence. We finally provide a simple application to V AR models.

It is argued that crises open up a window of opportunity to implement policies that otherwise would not have the necessary political backing. The argument goes that the political cost of deep reforms declines as crises unravel structural problems that need to be urgently rectified and the public is more willing to bear the pains associated with such reforms. This paper casts doubt on this prevalent view by showing that not only the crises-reforms hypothesis is unfounded in the data, but rather crises are associated with slowing structural reforms depending on the institutional environment. In particular, we look at measures of liberalization in international trade, agriculture, network industries, and financial markets. We find that, after a financial crisis, democracies neither open nor close their economy. On the contrary, autocracies reduce liberalizations in multiple economic sectors, as the fear of regime change might lead non-democratic rulers to please vested economic interests.

We establish sufficient conditions that ensure the uniqueness of Tarski-type fifixed points of monotone operators. Several applications are presented.

We propose a new theoretical approach to the study of editing rules applied by decision makers when dealing with repeated lotteries. Under the assumption that decision makers detect statedominance among simply two-outcome lotteries and always prefer n draws of a dominating lottery to n draws of a dominated lottery, we study editing rules beyond the use of acceptance rates. We derive an appropriate experimental methodology based on loss and gain differences, which also allows us to quantify the strength of preferences. An experiment supports previous findings showing that editing might depend on the risk profile of the underlying lottery. Moreover, we provide evidence that acceptance rates could lead to different conclusions than our methodology, because they generally do not account for the strength of preferences.

We extend the epistemic analysis of dynamic games of Battigalli and Siniscalchi (1999, 2002, 2007) from finite dynamic games to all simple games, that is, finite and infinite-horizon games with finite action sets at non-terminal stages and compact action sets at terminal stages. We prove a generalization of Lubin's (1974) extension result to deal with conditional probability systems and strong belief. With this, we can provide a short proof of the following result: in every simple dynamic game, strong rationalizability characterizes the behavioral implications of rationality and common strong belief in rationality.