Date: Thursday, 20 April 2023, at 12:00 pm
Location: Seminar Room Bruguier Pacini, DEM
Speaker: Paolo Buonanno (University of Bergamo)
Title: “All is Not Lost: Organized Crime and Social Capital Accumulation” (with I. Ferrari and A. Saia)
Abstract:
In this paper we study how social capital formation is related to organized crime. We exploit the dissolution of city councils upon evidence of Mafia infiltration to identify the causal effect of organized crime on social capital. Our main result consists in the estimation of the causal relationship between a municipality’s dissolution for Mafia and social capital.
To this end, we estimate a difference-in-differences (DID) model capturing the effect of a municipality’s dissolution on our main outcome variable, a social capital measure. We find that the dissolution for Mafia leads to a 25% increase in the number of taxpayers allocating 0.5% of their annual income tax to associations in their municipality. We also explore the dynamics and our results show the effect does not fade away once the compulsory administration leaves way to a new regularly elected local government.
Seminar organizers: Pietro Battiston
Download area
Seminar Paolo Buonanno – Poster
Information and contacts