Clean Online Seminar: Alessio Romarri

The next CLEAN online seminar will take place on 25th June at 4pm Italian time.

The presenter will be Alessio Romarri, PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona. The title of the paper is "Do far-right mayors increase the probability of hate-crimes? Evidence from Italy" (abstract below).

Send an email to gianmarco.daniele@unibocconi.it if you are interested in attending CLEAN online seminars.

Abstract: I investigate whether the mayor's political ideology impact the likelihood that a hate crime occurs in the Italian municipalities. I assemble a dataset of local elections from 2008 to 2018 and I focus on those won or lost with a small margin of victory by a far-right candidate. To detect episodes of hate crime, since an official dataset is almost missing in Italy, I use the data collected by Lunaria, a national NGO. Results show that in municipalities where an extreme-right mayor is in power, the likelihood of a hate crime occurring is significantly higher (from 4.3 to 5.3 percentage points). The effect of the far-right mayors on hate crimes is particularly strong in the first years of their mandate and persists if the most serious acts (physical assaults) are considered. The results are driven from municipalities with higher Internet penetration. I also find that the election of far-right mayors generates spillovers in the surrounding municipalities, especially in areas where the presence of the far-right is recent.