Publications
Selected Work in Progress
Old Working Papers
- Buonanno, P., Cervellati, M., Lazzaroni, S. and G. Prarolo (forthcoming) 'Historical Social Contracts and their Legacy: A Disaggregated Analysis for the Medieval Republics’, Journal of Economic Growth.
[Working Paper]
- 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]
- 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]
- 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) [Submitted]
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.
Selected Work in Progress
- 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 leveraging on the distribution of surnames and machine learning techniques. Exploiting the timing of migration, a plausibly exogenous measure of exposure to Fascism, and the occurrence of strong earthquakes as push factor for migration, I show that Italo-Argentine MPs with ancestors/relatives migrated during Mussolini’s rise have a higher probability to be affiliated to the Peronist party. Findings are robust to samples perturbations, placebo tests, and several specification checks. The relationship is stronger in more recent years (after 1983), while it is not significant during earlier Peronist presidencies (1946-1955). I show that during Perón’s first mandates the probability to be affiliated to the Peronist party is rather associated with having families migrated during Mussolini’s regime. I provide suggestive evidence that ideological transmission occurred through a combination of transmission along (most likely horizontal) family lines and Italian social networks.
- 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). - The Spatial Drivers of Discrimination: Evidence from Anti-Muslim Fake News in India
(with S. S. Abraham, G. Lanzara, P. Masella, and M. P. Squicciarini) [Submitted]
This paper studies how discriminatory fake news arises and spatially diffuses. We focus on India at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: on March 30, a Muslim convention (the Tablighi Jamaat) in New Delhi became publicly recognized as a COVID hotspot, and the next day, fake news on Muslims intentionally spreading the virus spiked. Using Twitter data, we build a comprehensive novel dataset of georeferenced tweets to identify anti-Muslim fake news. We find, in cross-sectional and difference-in-difference settings, that discriminatory fake news became much more widespread after March 30 (1) in New Delhi, (2) in districts closer to New Delhi, and (3) in districts with higher social media interactions with New Delhi. Further, we investigate whether deeply rooted historical factors may have also played a role in the diffusion of anti-Muslim fake news: we show that, after March 30, discriminatory fake news was more common in districts historically exposed to attacks by Muslim groups. - Massive Contagion and Minorities Discrimination: Evidence from the COVID Outbreak and the Chinese Population
(with G. Lanzara, P. Masella, and M. P. Squicciarini) [Draft coming soon]
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]
