Three essays in applied economics

Abstract

When Women Win: Female Representation and Violence Against Women: We investigate the impact of female representation on violence against women. Using a regression discontinuity design on mixed-gender races for U.S. House of Representative, we find that the election of a woman significantly lowers the incidence of gender-related crime. During the first year of office, the number of victims of domestic femicides in the district decreases between 38 and 50 percent. At the same time, we do not find a significant effect in the number of rapes reported, which we show can be attributed to the combination of increased reporting and the lower incidence of such crimes. Importantly, the effect vanishes in subsequent periods. We document a deterrence effect of female representation, where the higher probability of being caught, brought about by higher police effort and more reporting, discourages males to commit crime. Colluding With Your Peers: Neighbours and Selective Absenteeism in the Parliament: This paper evaluates the effect of peers on Parliamentary absenteeism. Using data from the Italian House of Representatives, we exploit the alphabetical assignment of seats adopted by the largest party in the House to evaluate how being neighbours affects joint-attendance patterns. We find that, while it does not have an effect on average, being neighbours has significant heterogeneous effects depending on the gender-composition of couples. In particular, couples in which both members are males are more likely to alternate, rather than being jointly-absent or jointly-present, when seated together. We argue that this is evidence of MPs becoming more likely to cooperate by substituting one’s vote with another’s, i.e. more likely to collude. The "Great Lockdown": Inactive Workers and Mortality by Covid-19: This paper estimates the causal effect of the economic lockdown imposed by the Italian Government in March 2020 on mortality by Covid-19 and on mobility patterns. Our difference-in-difference design compares outcomes in municipalities above-and-below the median variation in the share of active population within a province before-and-after the lockdown, exploiting the exogenous variation in the number of active workers across municipalities induced by the measure. Our results show that the intensity of the economic lockdown is associated to a statistically significant reduction in mortality by Covid-19 and, in particular, for age groups between 30-64 and older. Back of the envelope calculations indicate that 4,793 deaths were avoided, in the 26 days between April 5 to April 30, in the 3,518 municipalities which experienced a more intense lockdown.