Ciao!
I am an economist working in political economy and industrial organization.
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Turin and Collegio Carlo Alberto in April 2025.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Brescia (Department of Economics and Management).
matteo.broso@gmail.com
The political economy literature on social media has primarily focused on misinformation and polarization. We highlight a different and overlooked channel: the effect of data-driven voter profiling on politicians’ incentives to acquire policy-relevant information. We develop a model in which an incumbent politician can exert costly effort to learn about an uncertain state of the world before proposing a policy to a representative voter. The politician does not perfectly observe the voter's prior beliefs, or opinion. Improvements in voter profiling, such as those enabled by social media, correspond to reductions in this uncertainty. The politician's learning effort increases her re-election chances through two channels: a quality effect, by improving the match between the policy and the true state; and a persuasion effect, by inducing voters to place lower weight on their opinion and thereby compressing ex-post disagreement across possible voter types. We show that the higher the politician's uncertainty over the voter's opinion, the stronger her incentives to exert effort to change it. Therefore, improved voter profiling lowers equilibrium learning effort and ultimately reduces the quality of democratic representation.
Gender Prescribed Occupations and the Wage Gap (with Andrea Gallice and Caterina Muratori), February 2026
We propose a model in which workers hold heterogeneous attitudes toward a social norm that prescribes which occupations are appropriate for each gender. Workers who enter occupations deemed appropriate for the opposite gender incur endogenous reputation costs. We show that: (i) workers trade off reputation concerns and wage incentives when choosing occupations; (ii) social norms can contribute to the gender pay gap by discouraging women from entering higher-paying, male-dominated sectors; and (iii) norm-breaking generates positive externalities by reducing social stigma for all workers, leading to inefficiently low levels of norm breaking in equilibrium. Despite benefiting women at the individual level, relaxing social norms can have ambiguous effects on the equilibrium gender wage gap due to endogenous sorting responses.
Mergers, Lobbying and Elections: Is There a "Curse of Bigness"? (with Tommaso Valletti), March 2026, Revise and Resubmit, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization
We study the impact of mergers on quid-pro-quo lobbying and elections in a political agency model. Two incumbent firms can lobby an incumbent politician to block a pro-competitive reform. The politician's type determines whether they are susceptible to the firms' influence or not. A representative voter tries to infer the politician's type monitoring the policy-making process. We show that lobbying increases when firms merge because rents from political protection are not dissipated by price competition. While greater market concentration may increase prices and political influence, it also improves voters’ ability to screen bad politicians by observing distorted policy outcomes. This generates a novel trade-off: mergers can harm consumers through market and political power, yet improve selection of politicians. We characterize when standard consumer welfare–based merger control is too lenient or too strict once these political economy effects are taken into account.
Privatization under Political Ties, August 2025, Revise and Resubmit, The Journal of Industrial Economics
I study a product differentiation model with endogenous entry where a politically connected public firm competes with a private one. Consumers are heterogenous in their willingness to pay. First, I argue that because of political ties, the public firm may mimic the preferences of the consumer with the median type. Then, I show that as privatization increases, the market outcome shifts from an inefficient public monopoly to a duopoly, where the public firm can even be more profitable than the private one, and welfare is higher. However, full privatization is not socially optimal as it implies excessive product differentiation.
The Rise of Provident Institutions, draft coming soon
I study the relationship between technological progress and the quality of political institutions. A citizen and a ruler interact over time. The citizen owns a stock of capital which, in every period, yields some output according to a time-varying technology. The ruler controls institutions and can choose how much output to expropriate for her private consumption, subject to the citizen's participation constraint. The speed of technological progress is endogenous to the citizen's choice of effort. The citizen optimally exerts more effort when the ruler sets less extractive institutions. As productivity grows, the ruler faces a dynamic trade-off. Higher rent extraction increases her payoff today, but reduces the citizen’s effort, thereby slowing the pace of technological progress and ultimately lowering her payoff tomorrow. I show that the equilibrium of the model features an endogenous transition from a regime with high rent extraction and slow technological progress, to a regime with low rent extraction and fast technological progress.
Colonial Wars and Modern Nationalism: Evidence from Fascist Italy's Campaigns in East Africa (with Jeanne Pinay), draft coming soon
European empires dominated entire continents for centuries. Yet, the literature on colonial legacies has largely focused on the long-term effects of colonialism in former colonies, overlooking its consequences for the former colonial powers themselves. We study the effect of fascist Italy’s colonial campaigns in East Africa in the 1930s on contemporary political outcomes. Using data on the surnames of Italian soldiers buried in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the contemporary distribution of surnames across Italy, we construct an index of exposure to colonial wars at the municipality level. We show that municipalities more exposed to the 1930s colonial campaigns were more likely to support neo-fascist and nationalist parties in the immediate postwar electoral cycles and are still more likely to support far-right parties today. To address endogeneity concerns, we adopt an Instrumental Variable (IV) approach. Our IV exploits the historical geographical distribution of mountain troops, which were disproportionately deployed in East Africa because of Ethiopia's mountainous territory. The instrument is unrelated to pre-1930 support for fascism. The IV estimates confirm a causal interpretation for our results. Moreover, we show that the observed effects are stronger in municipalities with more migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Electoral Closeness and Campaign Contributions: Theory and Evidence from Deaths of US House Members (with Tommaso Valletti and Edoardo Teso)