We investigate whether corruption amplifies the political effects of economic crises. Using Spanish municipal-level data and a difference-in-difference strategy, we find that local unemployment shocks experienced during the Great Recession (2008-2015) increased political fragmentation. This effect was four times larger in municipalities exposed to malfeasance than in municipalities without a...

We show that regional heterogeneity of underlying fundamentals (e.g. economic history, geography, natural resources, social capital) can lead to extreme voting in federations. When the outcome of federal policies { such as transfer schemes, market regulation, migration targets { depends on these fundamentals, the set of regions that benefits or...

The IEB Report on Fiscal Federalism and Public Finance is published every year, since 2009, with the aim of analysing issues of great relevance today related to fiscal federalism and public finance.

The gender gap in the labour market is currently the subject of much debate in the news media and in political forums. There is an ample body of evidence, for example, that both the female rate participation in the job market and women’s wages3 are lower than those of men....

Why do anti-immigrant political parties have more success in areas that host fewer immigrants? Recent evidence from around the world suggests that often anti-immigrant political parties receive most of their electoral support from areas where low shares of immigrants live. For example, in the 2017 French Presidential elections, Emmanuel Macron...

Why do anti-immigrant political parties have more success in areas that host fewer immigrants? Using regression discontinuity design, structural breaks search methods and data from a sample of Italian municipalities, we show that the relationship between the vote shares of anti-immigrant parties and the share of immigrants follows a U-shaped...