Sending the Pork Home: Birth Town Bias in Transfers to Italian Municipalities

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 5554

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: General ; State and Local Budget and Expenditures ; Intergovernmental Relations; Federalism; Secession ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
• Subject: pork-barrel politics ; distributive policies ; careers in politics ; political economy

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Carozzi, Felipe ; Repetto, Luca
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2015

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/123209
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET