Sending the pork home: Birth town bias in transfers to Italian municipalities

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Carozzi, Felipe; Repetto, Luca
• 署名单位: University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Uppsala University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.12.009
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 42-52
• 关键词: Pork-barrel politics; Distributive policies; careers in politics; political economy

摘要

We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament are favoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using a panel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we find that municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive larger transfers per capita. Exploiting variation in birthplaces induced by parliamentary turnover for estimation, we find that this effect is driven by legislators who were born in a town outside their district of election. As a result, we argue that our findings cannot be a consequence of re-election incentives, the usual motivation for pork-barrel policies in the literature. Rather, politicians may be pursuing other personal motives. In line with this hypothesis, we find that the birth town bias essentially disappears when legislative elections are near. We explore several possible mechanisms behind our results by matching parliamentarians to a detailed dataset on local level administrators. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.