​Working Papers 
  • Political History, Culture and Cooperation: Medieval Social Contracts and their Legacy [Download pdf]
    (with P. Buonanno, M. Cervellati and G. Prarolo)
    We study the long-shadow of local political history for socio-economic outcomes and attitudes today. Following historical evidence on medieval communal and maritime republics, we conceptualize more inclusive and exploitative social contracts as resulting from the interplay between the different incentives of ruling elites and the behavior of the population at large. Tracking the emergence, territorial evolution and disappearance of each polity in pre-industrial Italy, we measure the intensity of exposure to different republics over time and the number of changes in the identity of rulers (i.e. political stability) in each municipality. Looking within territories ever ruled by the republics, we find that a longer exposure to communal polities increases fiscal compliance, while the forceful annexation to the rule of maritime republics and higher political instability reduce it. Contribution to public goods goes hand-in-hand with fiscal policies and is positively associated to generalized morality (organ donations) but crowds-out private mutual help. Political history also shapes population diversity today in line with evidence on differently attractive historical legal regulations. The results are robust to extensive checks and are confirmed using local variation in distance to centers of power and to the changing network of polities in instrumental variable regressions. Findings suggest that historical political instability and selected migration are reinforcing mechanisms of historical persistence of multiple social contracts until today.

  • Political Geography and Pre Pre-Industrial Development: A Theory and Evidence for Europe 1000-1850  [Download pdf]
    (with M. Cervellati, G. Prarolo and P. Vanin) 
    We present a theory of the drivers, and a measurement of the patterns, of the evolution of historical sovereign polities over time and space in Europe, and we study their impact on pre-industrial urban development. We model changing state capacity and rule of law over space as resulting from strategic interactions between ruling elites. We characterize the endogenous evolution of equilibrium number, size, borders and type of polities. The framework characterizes the timing and location of appearance (and disappearance) of city states and the transition from domain reigns to modern territorial states. The model predicts the emergence of hard borders and a reversal in the role of locations' centrality for development. We measure the territorial evolution of sovereign polities by assembling geo-referenced yearly panel data on the political geography of each location in Europe for the period 1000-1850 and we investigate its implications for pre-industrial urban growth. Results document a changing role of polity size and type and a reversal of centrality from across to within polities which is associated to increasing importance of domestic market potential after the XVII century.

Work in Progress   
  • History, Culture, and Preferences over Democratic Institutions
    (with M. Cervellati)
    ​    A growing literature studies the working of democratic institutions and their emergence. Little is known on preferences over political institutions in the population at large and on their historical drivers. We investigate the empirical determinants of the votes in the Referendum over Monarchy vs Republic held, for the first time in universal franchise, at the end of WWI in 1946 in Italy. We construct a large disaggregate database to study the determinants of the votes for about 8100 municipalities in Italy. A main variable of interest is the exposure to the rule of more or less republican and monarchic sovereign polities in medieval times. We track the emergence, evolution and territorial disappearance of the sovereign polities in pre-industrial times. We build a time varying political score for the Italian peninsula that offers a proxy of the actual exposure to the rule of republics and monarchies in each location and each year over the period 1000-1861. The data allows a first measurement of past exposure to different political institutions and an exploration of their (cultural) legacy for preferences over Republic and Monarchy during the transition to democracy. The empirical analysis also accounts for economic conflicts of interests (in terms of historical land inequality), socio-economic conditions and for the role of short term contingencies (like fascist-nazi massacres and occupations along the nazi defensive lines during WWII).
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  • Ideological Contagion and Populism: Evidence from Argentina.
    This paper studies the transmission of political ideologies between two countries. I study the diffusion of Populism in Argentina from 1946 through the lenses of the Italian mass migration wave (1880-1945). I hypothesize that populist aspects of Mussolini's Fascist ideology spread to Argentina through migrants, contributing to the rise of Peronism. I focus on Italo-Argentine members of the Argentine parliament and reconstruct their Italian province of origin exploiting the distribution of surnames and machine learning techniques. My analysis proceeds in three steps. First, exploiting the period of migration I find that MPs with ancestors migrated during the rise of Mussolini are more likely to be Peronist, while migration in previous or later periods is not significantly associated with Peronist affiliation. Second, using a plausibly exogenous measure of exposure to Fascism I find that direct exposure drives the positive effect associated with the period of Mussolini's rise (and regime, although the effect is smaller). Third, using the occurrence of strong earthquakes as a push factor to further isolate political from economic motives of migration further confirms the results. Findings are stronger in the long run and are robust to several checks. Cultural transmission seems the mechanism driving the effects from exposure during Mussolini's rise and regime, highlighting the importance of immigrants de-radicalisation strategies.

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Publications
  • Lazzaroni, S. and N. Wagner (2016) 'Misfortunes never come singly: structural change multiple shocks and child malnutrition in rural Senegal’, Economics and Human Biology 23(December): 246–262. [Download pdf]
                       [Working Paper] and [Policy Brief] available as part of the Pathways to Resilience in Semi-Arid Economies [PRISE] research project

  • Bergeijk, P.A.G. van and S. Lazzaroni (2015) ‘Macroeconomics of Natural Disasters: Strengths and Weaknesses of Meta-Analysis versus Review of the Literature’, Risk Analysis 35(6): 1050-1072.  [Download pdf]
 
  • Lazzaroni, S. and P.A.G. van Bergeijk (2014) ‘Natural Disasters Impact, Factors of Resilience and Development: A Meta Analysis of the Macroeconomic Literature’, Ecological Economics 107(11): 333-346. [Download pdf]

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Old Working Papers
  • Lazzaroni, S. and A.S. Bedi (2014) 'Weather variability and food consumption: Evidence from Rural Uganda’, ISS Working Paper 585. The Hague, Netherlands: International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. [Download pdf]