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

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

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

We analyze the distribution of central transfers to municipal governments for the period between the 1993 and the 2005 electoral reforms using a panel of Italian municipalities. We find evidence that being the birth town of a Member of Parliament results in an increase in yearly transfers per capita paid to a municipal administration of roughly 2 percent. Controlling for town fixed effects and concentrating on politicians who are member of economic commissions we confirm that the effect is driven by an active behavior of the politician and not by unobserved town-level characteristics. Using a feature of single member district systems we are able to conclude that these actions are not driven by the desire of being re-elected in Parliament, the standard explanation for pork-barrel spending in the literature. Instead, our results suggest that those extra transfers may be a way for a politician to prepare the ground for a post-congressional career in local government

Distributive politics inside the city? The political economy of Spain's Plan E

We study the allocation of investment projects by municipal governments across groups of voters using data from a fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain between 2009 and 2011. This program provided municipalities with a large endowment to spend in public investments and required the geocoding of each individual project. Combining these data with disaggregated election information at the census area level, we study whether politicians use expenditures to target their supporters or to raise turnout. Estimates from regression, matching and RDD methods show no evidence of local governments targeting areas of core support. Instead, investment goes disproportionately to low turnout areas, suggesting that politicians use funds to increase participation. We confirm this hypothesis by showing that, in the following elections, turnout is increased in areas that received more investment. Our results suggest that mobilization can be a force in shaping the allocation of resources across voter groups within cities

Distributive politics inside the city? The political economy of Spain’s Plan E

We study distributive politics inside cities by analysing how local governments allocate investment projects to voters across neighbourhoods. In particular, we ask whether politicians use investment to target their own supporters. To this aim, we use detailed geo-located investment data from Plan E, a large fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain in 2009–2011. Our main empirical strategy is based on a close-elections regression-discontinuity design. In contrast to previous studies – which use aggregate data at the district or municipal level – we exploit spatial variation in both investment and voter support within municipalities and find no evidence of supporter targeting. Complementary results indicate that voters may be responding to investment by increasing turnout

How the scars of past wars continue to shape UK society

Edward Pinchbeck, Felipe Carozzi and Luca Repetto discuss new research exploring how memory of losses from war affects communities and shapes social values. Their findings suggest the impact can reverberate through generations

Scars of war: the legacy of WW1 deaths on civic capital and combat motivation

What drives soldiers to risk their life in combat? We show that the legacy of war creates lasting conditions that encourage younger generations to take greater risks when fighting for their country. Using individual-level data from over 4 million British war records, we show that WWI deaths deeply affected local communities and the behaviour of the next generation of soldiers. Servicemen from localities that suffered heavier losses in WWI were more likely to die or to be awarded military honours for bravery in WW2. To explain these findings, we document that WWI deaths promoted civic capital in the inter-war period - as demonstrated by the creation of lasting war memorials, veterans' associations and charities, and increased voter participation. In addition, we show that sons of soldiers killed in WWI were more likely to die in combat, suggesting that both community-level and family-level transmission of values were important in this context

ELECTRO-MECHANICAL DESIGN OF A MAGNETIC GEAR PROTOTYPE

A magneto-mechanical approach is proposed to design a magnetic gear prototype. Firstly, an integrated tool for electromechanical simulations is developed, starting from a topological parametric model of a planetary magnetic gear (PMG). Then a CAD model is realised with a progressive rise in complexity, in order to achieve quickly exchangeable configurations for different experimental tests. Three different solutions are designed with advantages and drawbacks. Finally, a block-oriented dynamic model of a PMG, inserted in a mechanical driveline, is developed in Matlab/Simulink environment using the results of magneto mechanical simulations, to virtually test the dynamic behaviour of the device

Sliding friction and superlubricity of colloidal AFM probes coated by tribo-induced graphitic transfer layers

Colloidal probe Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) allows to explore sliding friction phenomena in graphite contacts of nominal lateral size up to hundreds of nanometers. It is known that contact formation involves tribo-induced material transfer of graphite flakes from the graphitic substrate to the colloidal probe. In this context, sliding states with nearly-vanishing friction, i.e. superlubricity, may set in. A comprehensive investigation of the transfer layer properties is mandatory to ascertain the origin of superlubricity. Here we explore the friction response of micrometric beads, of different size and pristine surface roughness, sliding on graphite under ambient conditions. We show that such tribosystems undergo a robust transition towards a low-adhesion, low-friction state dominated by mechanical interactions at one dominant tribo-induced nanocontact. Friction force spectroscopy reveals that the nanocontact can be superlubric or dissipative, in fact undergoing a load-driven transition from dissipative stick-slip to continuous superlubric sliding. This behavior is excellently described by the thermally-activated, single-asperity Prandtl-Tomlinson model. Our results indicate that upon formation of the transfer layer, friction depends on the energy landscape experienced by the topographically-highest tribo-induced nanoasperity. Consistently we find larger dissipation when the tribo-induced nanoasperity is sled against surfaces with higher atomic corrugation than graphite, like MoS2 and WS2, in prototypical Van der Waals layered hetero-junctions.Comment: 35 pages, 6 figures, to be published in Langmui