Four new papers accepted for publication!

We are ecstatic to announce that four new papers from our researchers have been accepted for publication!

A new paper, titled "Fueling Organized Crime: The Mexican War on Drugs and Oil Thefts" and written by CLEAN's Gianmarco Daniele, Marco Le Moglie, and Paolo Pinotti, coauthored with Giacomo Battiston (Rockwool Foundation), has been accepted for publication at The Economic Journal. They argue that the Mexican War on Drugs pushed drug cartels into large-scale oil theft, as government crackdowns on one criminal sector do not deter but rather redirect criminal organizations towards new sectors.

Forthcoming in the American Economic Review, Paolo Pinotti, along with Alberto Alesina, Michela Carlana, and Eliana La Ferrara (Harvard Kennedy School), wrote "Revealing Stereotypes: Evidence from Immigrants in Schools". The paper studies how people update their behavior after being made aware of bias. Through two experiments on Italian teachers' stereotypes against foreign students, they study how effective debiasing might be in closing the native-immigrant gap and what might be the best strategy to pursue.

Accepted for publication at the Journal of Political Economy and coauthored with Jerome Adda (Bocconi University) and Giulia Tura (University of Milano-Bicocca), in "There's More to Marriage than Love: The Effect of Legal Status and Cultural Distance on Intermarriages and Separations" Paolo Pinotti analyzes the way legal status influences marriage choices of natives and migrants. Through a model of marriage, fertility, and separation, the authors estimate the role of legal status and the strength of cultural preferences, evaluting the welfare consequences of granting legal status to immigrants.

Finally, coauthored with Federico Cingano (Bank of Italy), Filippo Palomba (PhD student at Princeton University and former RA at CLEAN), and Enrico Rettore (University of Padua), Paolo Pinotti's "Making Subsidies Work: Rules vs. Discretion" is forthcoming in Econometrica. In the paper, the authors estimate the employment effects of a large program of public investment subsidies to private firms, which ranked applicants on a score reflecting both objective rules and local politicians’ discretion. While both rankings effectively identify firms that produce the greatest employment gains, they find that an objective rule significantly increases cost-effectiveness compared to a discretionary one.