May 12, 2026 – 14.30h – Room 1038

We analyze the incentives of authoritarian regimes to segment access to censored content through technology. Citizens choose whether to pay to access censored online content at a cost fixed by the regime: the firewall. A low firewall segments access and generates more compliance than full censorship – a high firewall – ever could. Regime opponents self-select into consuming censored content, and comply conditional on positive independent reporting. Regime supporters exclusively consume state propaganda, which secures their compliance. This segment-and-rule strategy can be engineered by making local news outlets uninformative, or by affecting the intrinsic benefit from access.

Lobbying transparency regulations are hailed as a potential solution to concerns about the excessive influence of special interest groups (SIGs) over policy-making. I study how these regulations shape strategic interactions between voters, politicians and SIGs. By clarifying the process through which a policy was implemented, lobbying transparency helps voters hold politicians accountable and control the influence of SIGs. Ex-post, conditional on access, SIGs prefer to operate without lobbying transparency. Ex-ante, they may benefit from lobbying transparency because it redirect the voters’ blame towards politicians. Ultimately however, lobbying transparency standards may hurt the electoral prospects of politicians and thus risk never being implemented, potentially explaining why voters’ demand for it remains unanswered.

We study how expanding immigrants’ rights affects their political and social Integration by leveraging Romania’s 2007 EU accession, which granted Romanian immigrants in Italy municipal voting and residency rights. Using municipality-level event studies, we find: (1) Enfranchisement increased the election of Romanian-born councilors—especially in competitive races—despite limited changes in candidacy rates. It also increased Romanian turnout, suggesting that electoral gains stem from an expanded voter base. An instrumented difference-in-differences analysis shows this is driven by pre-existing Romanian residents, not new arrivals. (2) Consent to organ donation rose among Romanians post-2007, indicating that the expansion of rights extends to prosocial behavior. (3) Nonetheless, immigrant presence continues to raise support for right-leaning parties and security spending while reducing social spending, highlighting persistent native backlash that outweighs immigrant political influence

April 28, 2026 – 14.30h – Room 1038

April 14, 2026 – 14.30h – Sala de Recepcions