Lucio Picci

Pork Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-1994

This paper analyzes the political determinants of the distribution of infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to the country’s 92 provinces between 1953 and 1994. Extending implications of theories of legislative behavior to the context of open-list proportional representation, we examine whether individually powerful legislators and ruling parties direct spending to core or marginal electoral districts, and whether opposition parties share resources via a norm of universalism. We show that when districts elect politically more powerful deputies from the governing parties, they receive more investments. We interpret this as indicating that legislators with political resources reward their core voters by investing in public works in their districts. The governing parties, by contrast, are not able to discipline their own members of parliament sufficiently to target the parties’ areas of core electoral strength. Finally, we find no evidence that a norm of universalism operates to steer resources to areas when the main opposition party gains more votes.

The quantitative evaluation of the economic impact of e-government: A structural modelling approach

Abstract I propose a quantitative methodology to analyze the economic impact of e-government based on structural modeling, allowing for a careful description of the underlying theoretical assumptions and for an assessment of different policy scenarios. The transparent relation between the theory and the results obtained is an advantage with respect to purely narrative methods. The methodology departs significantly both from studies in the cost-benefit analysis tradition and from the analysis of “e-readiness” indexes, whose purpose is a quantification of preconditions for successful policies. An illustration of the method is provided, using data from the Italian region of Tuscany.

Incumbency Effects under Proportional Representation: Leaders and Backbenchers in the Postwar Italian Chamber of Deputies

We study incumbency effects for individual legislators from two political parties (Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party) in Italys lower house of representatives over 10 legislatures (1948–92) elected using open-list proportional representation. Our analysis finds no reelection advantage for the average incumbent legislator. Only a tiny elite in each party successfully creates an incumbency advantage. We find incumbents advantaged for reselection by their political party. We interpret reselection advantage as a party loyalty premium. Our study depicts a political environment monopolized by party leaders who reward party loyalty but hamper legislators in appealing directly to voters.

My Scale or your Meter? Evaluating Methods of Measuring the Internet

Measuring the Internet - the size of its infrastructure, how many people use it, and their prevalent uses - is of obvious interest. However, the wealth of available quantitative information regarding the Internet so far has fallen short of satisfying the many needs that it would fulfill. We set the problem of measuring the Internet into a framework that allows us to derive insights on the peculiar nature of the Internet as a piece of infrastructure. After reviewing the current measures available, while drawing a distinction between the object of measurement, and the types of institutions involved in it, we provide some indications on what data should be trusted more, and how better measures of the Internet could be obtained.

Explaining Long- and Short-Run Interactions in Time Series Data

In this article, I extend the concept of separate cointegration to include the common-feature trend-cycle decomposition approach. This combined approach operates a reduction of the parameter space and permits the identification of the time series long- and short-run constituent factors. A careful assessment of their reciprocal relations, in turn, allows for the answering of potentially interesting economic questions. To show the usefulness of the proposed methodology, I apply it to the study of the relationships between the international business cycle and trade flows.

The Determinants of Cross-Border Corruption

We reconsider the question of what determines corruption at the cross-national level, using new data and methods. Unlike previous studies that rely on perception or survey-based data that have been the subject of criticisms, we employ a new dataset of observed cases of cross-border graft, where a firm headquartered in a country bribes public officials in another foreign country. We find that economic development and a small population is associated with lower levels of corruption, as are freedom of the press, political rights, the presence of established democratic institutions, the salience of women’s role in society, and low exports of natural resources such as oil. The particular structure of the data also allows for the first time to consider the “relational aspects�? of corrupt relationships, which come to the fore when parties to the corrupt transaction, the briber and the bribee, reside in different countries. Overall, we find limited evidence that the relational factors that we consider affect corruption, beyond the effects that they often have on bilateral trade.

International Agreements, Reputational Screening and the Long-Run Interests of the State

Incomplete information on the degree to which governments internalize the long-run interests of the state is an essential element of information asymmetry in international relations. A reputational model with such incomplete information captures two observed facts: i. costly activities, among which there may be compliance with the terms of an international agreement, take place even before it formally comes into force, and ii. the parties to an agreement do not always comply with it. International agreements provide information on the level of institutional strength of countries. Such a transparency-increasing effect stems from self-selection into international agreements, which however may be imperfect. Incomplete information in other dimensions, such as the magnitude of future gains following compliance, may or may not generate an equilibrium path where i. and i. are observed: when thinking about the role of asymmetric information in supporting reputational equilibria in international relations, specifying the type of asymmetry matters. To discuss the implications of the model, we consider the case of accession of new member countries to the European Union.

Trends in Corruptions Around the World

The problem of measuring changes in corruption internationally is significantly more daunting than that of estimating their levels. We compute trends in corruption for groups of geographically proximate countries, based on the geographic distribution of cases of cross-border bribes, and confirm that geographic variations in corruption are greater than time variations. They are then compared with changes in perceived corruption, as measured by Transparency Internationals Corruption Perception Index. We find that these alternative measures of changes of corruption in time are not significantly correlated with each other. Using a panel data estimation technique, we attempt to explain trends in corruption. We only partially confirm results that are obtained when the purpose is to account for their levels in the context of a cross-sectional study. Overall, we conclude that the study of changes in levels of corruption is still in its infancy.

The ‘inventor balance’ and the functional specialization in global inventive activities

ABSTRACT Inventors and organizational assets are inputs of inventive activities which are often provided at a global scale, where countries might specialize in the provision of one or the other type of inputs. We introduce a new patent-based metric, the ‘inventor balance’, to quantify this type of functional specialization, which we discover to be considerable, and we propose a conceptual framework to explain it. We observe a progressive ‘decoupling’ of national sub-systems providing respectively inventors and organizational assets. Moreover, we find that countries with a high level of innovativeness relative to their economic development, high technological specialization, and strong individualistic cultural traits, contribute relatively more inventors than organizations to the global production of inventions.