Ricerc@Sapienza

Corrupted behaviors and the use of political power for private gains by policy-makers are likely to generate an undue appropriation of wealth and an exacerbation of economic inequality. When the distribution of wealth is perceived as unfair, the demand for redistribution tends to become stronger. In this project, we dig into these issues and explore the connection among them. First, we will investigate how the exercise of political power stimulates opportunistic behaviors by politicians and will consider the economic consequences of such conduct. Second, we will study the evolution of wealth distribution in the long run and the dynamics of intergenerational mobility both in the past and in present. Third, we will examine how wealth inequality and unjust appropriation of resources generate a demand for redistribution. These research questions are particularly challenging to answer due to identification problems in the absence of experimental variation in the data. To deal with these issues, we will design identification strategies by employing newly constructed datasets and exploiting quasi-natural experiments. In the first part of the project, we will implement an analysis based on historical data and will reconstruct the evolution of wealth concentration in the Renaissance and early modern Florence, with a particular focus on the changes occurred at the top share of wealth distribution. This is an innovation in the literature made possible by the digitalization and combination of so far unexplored data sources. In the second part of the work, in order to study the individual demand for redistribution, we will exploit a natural experiment provided by the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009. Matching information on the intensity of the shakes registered by the National Strong Motion Network with survey data, we will be able to assess how the individual beliefs about the redistributive role of the State react to the perceived unfairness of market allocations.