Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The Italian legislation provides a two-term limits for mayors, but it allows term-limited mayors to pass on the torch to one of their deputies as candidates for mayorship. We exploit this feature of the electoral system to design a novel identification strategy for separating the effects of 'accountability' (the difference in performance between two politicians facing different incentives in terms of re-elections) and 'competence' (the difference in performance between two politicians with different experience in policy making). Using a panel of 1203 Italian municipalities, from 1998 to 2015, we find a significant role for competence but not for accountability in affecting municipal spending. Specifically, second-and-last-term mayors, and first-term mayors with previous experience as executive officers, spend less, on average, than inexperienced first-term mayors. We also discuss the policy implications of this finding.

We compare health system responses to the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and Spain. In both countries, healthcare is managed at the regional level, but the central government behaved differently in the uncertainty surrounding the first wave, leaving more autonomy to regional governments in Italy than in Spain. Upon documenting national and regional health system responses, we show evidence of a significant gap in the number of infected cases, alongside regular and emergency hospital admissions, and mortality in the two countries, both at the national and at the regional level. We then discuss several potential mechanisms, such as policy stringency, the localization of the pandemic and mobility restrictions, measurement error, and especially the regional autonomy, enjoyed by Italian regions but not by Spanish regional governments amidst a state of alarm in both countries. We find that, given the strong localized effect of the pandemic, allowing more autonomy, and fostering experimentation and local solutions explains the gap between Italy and Spain in the first wave of the pandemic.

This paper provides evidence on the sources of differences in inequalities in educational scores in European Union member states, by decomposing them into their determining factors. Using PISA data from the 2000 and 2006 waves, the paper shows that inequalities emerge in all countries and in both period, but decreased in Germany, whilst they increased in France and Italy. Decomposition shows that educational inequalities do not only reflect background related inequality, but especially schools' characteristics. The findings allow policy makers to target areas that may make a contribution in reducing educational inequalities.

We investigate the existence of an 'electoral cycle bias' in the timing of media coverage of news with high political salience. In particular, we analyze how the electoral cycles at the regional level influence the coverage of news about corruption scandals in the Italian Regional Health Systems by two important national newspapers having opposite ideology, La Repubblica (left-wing oriented) and Il Giornale (right-wing oriented). Our findings show that Il Giornalesignificantly increases the number of articles about corruption scandals involving left-wing politicians since eight weeks before the elections, while it reduces the number of those about episodes of corruption without any political connection. On the contrary, La Repubblica increases the number of articles about episodes involving right-wing politicians only between four to eight weeks before the elections and it decreases those about no political episodes just the week right before them.