Suchergebnisse

In this work, we assess the role of a specific type of organized crime in influencing choices on where living within the city territory, and consequently, volatility in house prices. More specifically, we test how organized crime killing may influence house pricing behaviors. Firstly, we show evidences about how organized crime is associated with higher inequality of housing prices for Italian cities in 2011. Then, by collecting and geo referencing data on the city of Naples for the period 2002-2016, we test for the direct influence of homicides on the relevant territory, as on the neighboring districts. Results show a negative and significant impact of killing on the house prices either for sales or for rents and a positive effect in neighboring district, driving increases in within-city inequality.

In this chapter we contribute to the recent literature (e.g., Istat, 2010, Acciari et al., 2016, Guell et al., 2017) that provides evidence that inequality is high and social mobility is low in the Italian regions and prov-inces where organized crime is widespread such as those of Southern Italy. We complement this line of work in two respects. First, using a novel pan-el dataset at the regional level for the period 1985-2014 we investigate the relationship between inequality and organized crime at the regional level, exploiting both time and cross-sectional variation. Second, we assess the role of social mobility in organized crime. Our main finding is that higher inequality leads to higher organized crime development. The results are robust for different organized crime measures and inequality indices. For all measures the ratio of 90th quintile over the 10th in the distribution is a strong predictor of organized crime, even if we control for other covariates that capture economic development, education, etc. We also find that consumption inequality performs better that income inequality as the relevant inequality measure. Finally, we conduct a provincial level analysis to study the effect of socio-economic mobility on organized crime. We consider three alternative measures of social mobility. We find that lower socio-economic mobility displays a robust association with organized crime development

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of European Cohesion Policy in the regions of 12 EU countries in the period 1991–2008, on the basis of a spatial growth model, which allows for the identification of both direct and indirect effects of EU funds on GDP per worker growth. We find that "Objective 1" funds are characterized by strong spatial externalities and a positive and concave effect on the growth of GDP per worker, which reaches a peak at the ratio funds/GDP of approximately 3 percent and becomes non-significant after 4 percent. "Objective 2" and "Cohesion" funds have nonsignificant effects, while all the other funds exert a positive and significant effect, but their size is very limited. EU Cohesion Policy, moreover, appears to have increased its effectiveness over time. In the period 2000–2006 Objective 1 funds are estimated to have a median multiplier equal to 1.52, and to have added 0.37 percent to the GDP per worker growth. Overall, in the period 1991–2008, funds are estimated to have added 1.4 percent to the median annual growth, and to have reduced regional disparities of 8 basis points in terms of the Gini index.