Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/123209 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 5554
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators’ birth towns receive larger transfers per capita. Exploiting variation in birthplaces induced by parliamentary turnover for estimation, we find that this effect is driven by legislators who were born in a town outside their district of election. As a result, we argue that our findings cannot be a consequence of re-election incentives, the usual motivation for pork-barrel policies in the literature. Rather, politicians may be pursuing other personal motives. We explore several possible mechanisms behind our results by matching parliamentarians to a detailed dataset on local level administrators.
Subjects: 
pork-barrel politics
distributive policies
careers in politics
political economy
JEL: 
H50
H72
H77
D72
Document Type: 
Working Paper
Appears in Collections:

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.