Gabriele Pinto

📢 New Working Paper
“Pay Incentives in Politics: Evaluating a Large-Scale Salary Increase for Local Politicians”
✒️ Augusto Cerqua @samuelnocito.bsky.social @gabrieleaopinto.bsky.social

🔎 Find out how a reform in Italy led to more candidates entering elections:
www.cesifo.org/en/publicati...

You can find much more in the working paper 👇
📄 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
As always, feedback and comments are very welcome!

📈Results:
5) Electoral returns were even higher for politicians who also engaged in credit-claiming on social media 📱—

📈Results:
4) Most funds were channelled to MP’s electoral strongholds— note we are in an open-list, preference vote system 🗳️
Using a counterfactual analysis, we find that this pork-barreling strategy delivered significant electoral returns.

📈Results:
3) We observe both a reciprocal and universalistic behavior: nearly all politicians agree, and everyone gets a (weighted) piece of the cake 🍰

🛢️Data:
2) We match these data with credit-claiming posts on social media (example below 👇), and with municipality-level preference vote results (~1,500 municipalities) from two election rounds—before and after the projects.

🛢️Data:
1) We extract project–politician links by applying LLMs to thousands of resolutions from the Lombardia Regional Assembly (example in the figure 👇)

What happens when MPs gain broad discretion over public funds? we study the politics of “Signature Spending"✍️💵 — public spending projects funded and signed by specific politicians. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
#EconSky #polisky

Next week in Unibo