Calendrier du 04 octobre 2023
Development Economics Seminar
Du 04/10/2023 de 16:00 à 18:30
R2.01
MACCHIAVELLO Rocco (LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS )
Mafia & Firms
Organized crime groups (OCGs) invest substantial sums in legal economic activities worldwide. Evidence on these investments is limited due to data scarcity. We introduce a model differentiating contaminated (OCG benefits from connecting legal firm to illegal activities increasing the risk of detection) from pure investment (legal firm and OCG's illegal activities remain separate). The model clarifies how to distinguish these motives in the data and delivers predictions which we test using new and highly confidential records from the Bank of Italy's Financial Intelligence Unit. Among infiltrated firms, we distinguish born-clean (that are later infiltrated) from born-infiltrated firms. In born-clean firms, infiltration is associated with a change in the sources of finance and increased liquidity, but no changes in operational outcomes, consistent with a pure investment motive. Born-infiltrated firms, instead, present traits consistent with the contaminated motive. As born-clean firms attract more OCG capital, our results suggest OCGs mainly use legal firms to invest in assets and possibly acquire valuable connections. These results challenge existing literature and policy narratives.
Economic History Seminar
Du 04/10/2023 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09
ALVAREZ-NOGAL Carlos(Carlos III)
CASTILLO-GARCIA César(The New School for Social Research & PSE)
Well-being and inequality in Spain during the seventeenth century: the bull of Crusade.
Spain experienced economic decline from the 1570s to 1650, recovering gradually thereafter and only reaching its early 1570s per capita income in the 1820s. How did economic decline impact on people’s perception of well-being and inequality? An unexplored source, the bulls of the Crusade can offer some answers to that question. The bull was an alms that, after 1574, was annually collected by the Spanish Monarchy in its territories giving some material and spiritual benefits to the population. An inexpensive but fixed price alms was massively bought by those aged 12 and above. The number of bulls sold relative to the relevant population provides a measure of spiritual comfort and, hence, of subjective well-being. A subjective inequality measure, the ratio of the eight reales bulls sold, intended for wealthy and high social status people, to the two reales bulls sold, intended for the common people, is also estimated. After collecting data from 1574 to 1700, the results suggest that subjective well-being deteriorated during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century improving during its last third, while subjective inequality increased from 1600-1640 to fall in the third quarter of the century.