Capital Destruction and Economic Growth: The Effects of Sherman’s March, 1850-1920

Working paper.Using General William Sherman’s 1864--65 military march through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina during the American Civil War, this paper studies the effect of capital destruction on short- and long-run local economic activity, and the role of financial markets in the recovery process. We match an 1865 US War Department map of Sherman’s march to county-level demographic, agricultural, and manufacturing data from the 1850–1920 US Censuses. We show that the capital destruction induced by the March led to a large contraction in agricultural investment, farming asset prices, and manufacturing activity. Elements of the decline in agriculture persisted through 1920. Using information on local banks and access to credit, we argue that the underdevelopment of financial markets played a role in weakening the recovery

Essays in Corporate Finance

Macroeconomic and institutional shocks are important drivers of firms' activities. In chapter one, I examine the role of patent litigation in affecting companies’ innovation. Studying a landmark Supreme Court decision, I show that an improvement in patent enforcement positively affects the innovation activity of corporations. In chapter two, I study the role of private equity in period of large financial turmoil. In the context of the 2008 crisis in United Kingdom, I show that private equity backed companies experienced a lower decline in investment than a control group of similar companies that were not related to private equity. This effect is explained by the ability of private equity to relax the financing constraints of the portfolio companies when access to credit markets is limited. In chapter three, I explore the role of sovereign securities held by banks in the propagation of a financial shock to the economy. Using detailed loan level data matching firms and banks in Italy, the paper finds that the shock to banks' sovereign portfolio caused by the Greek bailout (2010) was passed on to firms through a contraction in credit. The effects of this shock were particularly disruptive for smaller companies.Business Economic

Private Equity and Financial Fragility during the Crisis

Do private equity firms contribute to financial fragility during economic crises? We find that during the 2008 financial crisis, PE-backed companies increased investments relative to their peers, while also experiencing greater equity and debt inflows. The effects are stronger among financially constrained companies and those whose private equity investors had more resources at the onset of the crisis. PE-backed companies consequentially experienced higher asset growth and increased market share during the crisis

Capital destruction and economic growth: the effects of Sherman’s March, 1850–1920

Using General Sherman’s March through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina during the Civil War, we study the effect of capital destruction on medium- and long-run local economic activity, and the role of financial markets in recovery. We show that the march’s capital destruction led to a large contraction in agricultural investment, farming asset prices, and manufacturing activity compared to neighboring counties. Elements of the decline in agriculture persisted through 1920. Exploiting variation in local access to antebellum credit, we argue that the underdevelopment of financial markets played a role in weakening the recovery.Published versio

Counting votes right : strategic voters versus strategic parties

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 32-33).This thesis, joint with F. Mezzanotti, provides a lower bound for the extent of strategic voting. Voters are strategic if they switch their vote from their favorite candidate to one of the main contenders in a tossup election. High levels of strategic voting are a concern for the representativity of democracy and the allocation efficiency of government goods and services. Recent work in economics has estimated that up to 80% of voters are strategic. We use a clean quasi experiment to highlight the shortcomings of previous identification strategies, which fail to fully account for the strategic behavior of parties. In an ideal experiment we would like to observe two identical votes with exogenous variation in the party victory probability. Among world parliamentary democracies 104 have a unique Chamber, 78 have two Chambers with different functions, and only one nation has two Chambers with the same identical functions: Italy. This allows us to observe two identical votes and therefore a valid counterfactual. In addition, the majority premia are calculated at the national level for the Congress ballot and at the regional level for the Senate ballot. This provides exogenous variation in the probability of victory. Because the two Chambers have identical functions, a sincere voter should vote for the same coalition in the two ballots. A strategic voter would instead respond to regions' specific victory probabilities. We combine this intuition with a geographical Regression Discontinuity approach, which allows us to compare voters across multiple Regional boundaries. We find much smaller estimates (5%) that we interpret as a lower bound but argue that it is a credible estimate. We also reconcile our result with the literature larger estimates (35% to 80%) showing how previous estimates could have confounded strategic parties and strategic voters due to the use of a non identical vote as counterfactual.by Giovanni Reggiani.S.M