Gemma Dipoppa

🧾NEW WP! New data, old divide 🧵

🇮🇹Our new @theifs.bsky.social WP
"The #Geography of #Child #Disability in #Italy: New Evidence from Administrative Data" (w/ P Biasi & De Paola) uses administrative data on the 2024 Universal Child Allowance, covering 4m children under 10.
🔗 tinyurl.com/yk89t39e

@gemmadipoppa.bsky.social and I summarize the main findings from our @nature.com article on air pollution, crop burning, and public health in South Asia in @voxdev.bsky.social 👇🏽

Substantial earnings penalties exist for racial minorities in France. Compared to the US, lower overall inequality benefits French racial minorities, but rank gaps are comparable, from Yajna Govind, Paolo Santini, and Ellora Derenoncourt https://www.nber.org/papers/w34013

Thank you @voxdev.bsky.social for covering our (w @saadgulzar.bsky.social) work on bureaucrat incentives to reduce crop-related fires and air pollution! Full paper at www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In Italy, a major tax credit favored middle earners and boosted votes for incumbents, revealing a political-economy tradeoff, from Silvia Vannutelli https://www.nber.org/papers/w33973

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community.

🔗 epssnet.org

Here’s a thread with everything you need to know.

🧵

🚨 June 30th deadline approaching 🚨

📣 Call for papers - CEMIR Junior Economist Workshop on #Migration Research 2025

📅 Event held October 28-29, 2025 in Munich at
@cesifo.org

🗣️ With a keynote from Jens Hainmueller ‪of
@stanford.edu

⌛ Details/Submit here: www.ifo.de/w/85244ca1

Version 2.0 of the National Elections Database is online! nationalelectionsdatabase.com
We cover presidential and parliamentary elections 1789–2023, extending the post-1945 data of Electoral Turnovers @reveconstudies.bsky.social (academic.oup.com/restud/advan...)
w/ Benjamin Marx and Vincent Rollet

Workplace Politics: How Politicians and Employers Subvert Elections In many countries politicians rely on employers to influence the voting behavior of their employees, but this type of voter mobilization has received very little attention. draws on unique surveys ...

Now available for preorder from Oxford University Press. Makes good beach reading too. www.amazon.com/Workplace-Po...

We have a great lineup of papers for the Junior Workshop in HPE. A limited number of spots are available for scholars interested in attending the workshop. Fill this form if you want to join us next June 25 at UC3M forms.gle/DckGoQDfniTU... @tinepaulsen.bsky.social @franvillamil.bsky.social

🚨 New working paper 🚨

@yangyangzhou.bsky.social, @shuningge.bsky.social, Naijia Liu, and I have completed a shareable draft of our working paper entitled "Liberalizing Refugee Hosting Policies without Losing the Vote." We hope you find it interesting.

See osf.io/preprints/os....

Happy to share a new paper now out in EJPR w/ @jeyalizade.bsky.social , @fabioellger.bsky.social and @mgruenewald.bsky.social exploring gendered effects of political violence on political supply.

https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1475-6765.70017

A 🧵 with findings

Here's last year's program. The conference is generously funded by Brown University through the Orlando Bravo Center for Economic Research and the PPE Center

📌 Excited to announce the 2nd Northeast Political Economy Conference 📌 We (briangknight.bsky.social) are seeking submissions from economists & political scientists working on political economy topics.

Please submit by June 16 and join us at Brown on Friday, Oct 3 forms.gle/i4wi88Q6P3tJ...

One week left to submit!

Congrats!! And great news for U Toronto too :)

Migration does not have to be what it is now

Innovation can change what migration *is*—more orderly, skilled, integrated, & tangibly beneficial to everyone affected

In 2012 I proposed one way: Global Skill Partnerships

The World Bank just released a major GSP roadmap—> hdl.handle.net/10986/42780

Hi Francesco, thanks a lot for your interest and I understand very well reducing international travels! Unfortunately we don’t know yet if we’ll have the possibility to have it streamed online so we can’t commit at this stage!

📣 Please consider applying to the Political Economy of Europe Conference - right before APSA (Sept 10, Vancouver). More info: ⬇️

We look forward to reading your work!

Thanks a lot Charley!

Julia, thanks so much :) it means a lot from you.

10/ This is my job market paper and it owes immensely to my committee @guygrossman.bsky.social, Dorothy Kronick, and @jlynch13.bsky.social, and to my Postdoc PI @saadgulzar.bsky.social. I'm very happy to see it out and wish I could celebrate it with you!

9/ If you’re interested in the intersection of migration, labor exploitation, and organized crime, check out the full paper here: 🔖 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

8/ 🚨 Policy takeaway: Combating organized crime isn’t just about state strength. Reducing reliance on criminal intermediaries requires tackling the conditions that make their services valuable—like migrant labor precarity.

7/ 🌏 This has global implications. Similar dynamics could explain how the Italo-American mafia exploited migrant labor in early 20th-century NYC, or how Nigerian gangs control undocumented migrants in Italy today.

6/ 💡Key insight: Mafias don’t just replace weak states. They complement strong states by enabling illegal activity that would otherwise be too risky. Organized crime should be reconceptualized as both a substitute for weak states and a tool for rule evasion in strong ones.

5/ Using a discontinuous shock affecting constructions and a shift-share instrument, I show that mafia presence increased where:
✅ Construction boomed (creating demand for unskilled labor)
✅ Migration from Southern Italy surged (providing a labor supply mafias could control)

4/ I test this using a novel dataset tracking mafia expansion from the 1960s onward. By scraping historical newspapers and validating with judicial data, I create the first municipal-level, time-varying measure of mafia presence in Italy. 📰

3/ In Northern Italy, mafias expanded where firms needed cheap, informal labor. They supplied it by controlling migrant workers from mafia-affected regions. This allowed local firms to evade labor laws without risk of denunciation.

2/ I argue that criminal groups succeed in strong states by offering a key service: enforcing and hiding illegal transactions. When rule enforcement is strong, breaking the law is costly. Mafias solve this by intermediating in informal markets—like the one for labor.