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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon

Time: 8:14 pm

Results for public economy

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Author: Barone, Guglielmo

Title: The Effect of Organized Crime on Public Funds

Summary: Organized crime is widely regarded as damaging to the economy, to say nothing of people’s lives. Yet little is known about the mechanism at work. This paper helps fill the gap by analyzing the impact of organized crime on the allocation of public subsidies to businesses. We assemble an innovative data set on Italian mafia crimes at municipal level and test whether organized crime diverts public funding. We exploit exogenous variations at the level of municipalities to instrument current mafia-style activity by using exogenous shifters of land productivity in the 19th century. Our results show that the presence of organized crime positively affects both the extensive margin (probability of funding) and the intensive margin (amount of public funding to enterprises). The impact is economically relevant and equal to at least one standard deviation of the dependent variable. Organized crime is also found to cause episodes of corruption in the public administration. A series of robustness checks confirm the findings. Our results suggest that geographically targeted aid policies should be careful to take local crime conditions into account.

Details: Bologna: Bank of Italy, Economic Research Union, 2013. 42p.

Source: Internet Resource: Bank of Italy Temi di Discussione (Working Paper) No. 916 : Accessed July 17, 2013 at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2281920

Year: 2013

Country: Italy

URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2281920

Shelf Number: 129425

Keywords:
Organized Crime (Italy)
Political Corruption
Public Economy