Ongoing Research

I propose a simple model of the relationship between economic growth and extractive taxation. A citizen and a ruler interact over time. The citizen owns a stock of capital which, in every period, yields some output. The ruler chooses how much output to expropriate for his private consumption, subject to the citizen's participation constraint. The growth rate of output is endogenous to the citizen's choice of effort. In this context, I define a social contract as a (Subgame Perfect) equilibrium of the repeated game. Moreover, a social contract is extractive at a given history if it leaves the citizen indifferent between the on path continuation and the outside option; and it is non-extractive otherwise.

The key tension of the model is that the citizen's effort in a given period increases output only in the future, when the ruler can always expropriate it. It follows that when players are myopic, any social contract is extractive. By contrast, when players are forward looking, any Pareto efficient and renegotiation proof social contract features a dual transition. As time passes, society endogenously moves from a regime of slow growth — where extractive social contracts are implementable — to a regime of fast growth — where they are not.

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. In this article, we study the effect of Italy's colonial expansion in East Africa on contemporary political outcomes. Using data on all 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. To isolate exogenous variation in municipalities' exposure, we exploit the historical geographical distribution of mountain troops of the Italian Army, which were largely deployed in East Africa because of Ethiopia's mountainous territory. We show that exposure to the 1930s colonial campaigns increased support for neo-fascist and nationalist parties in the immediate postwar electoral cycles, and still increases support for far-right parties today. Exploring possible mechanisms, we find that: (i) the effect is amplified in municipalities with a larger presence of Black African immigrants; (ii) far-right parties obtain larger electoral returns from anti-immigration rhetoric in municipalities with stronger colonial exposure. Taken together, our results suggest that the racial narratives used to justify the colonial expansion may have persisted across generations and continue to shape political attitudes today.

We develop a model in which an incumbent politician can exert costly effort to learn about an uncertain and policy-relevant state of the world before proposing a policy to a representative voter. The politician does not perfectly observe the voter's prior belief (or opinion). His epistemic effort increases the probability of re-election through two channels: a quality effect, as better information improves the match between the policy and the state; and a hegemony effect, as it induces the voter to place less weight on her prior and thereby compresses ex post disagreement across voter types. We show that, because of the hegemony effect, when the politician has more precise information about the voter, he implements a less informed policy. We connect this result to the recently observed rise in the use of big data in politics.

We study a dynamic model where a firm can grow in size by acquiring competitors and lobby office-seeking politicians. When the firm is distressed, the incumbent politician loses the office with some probability. Larger firms are less likely to experience distress but their distress has more severe political consequences. To prevent these, politicians can offer political support to the firm. We show that, in equilibrium: (i) the level of political support is non-monotone in the firm's size; (ii) the firm can complete acquisitions just to extract political support; and (iii) the number of these “Political Acquisitions” is non-monotone in the strength of politicians' re-election incentives.