EMANUELE BRACCO http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/bracco/ [email protected]
CONTACT ADDRESS Department of Economics Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YW UK Office Phone number: +44 (0)1524 5 92728 Mobile number: +44 (0) 7963 686604
RESEARCH FIELDS Applied Microeconomic Theory, Public Economics, Political Economy, Public Finance, Empirical Microeconomics
EDUCATION UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK PhD in Economics (pending), submitted in January 2011. Thesis: “Essays in Politlcal Economy”. Advsiors: Prof. Amrita Dhillon and Prof. Ben Lockwood. LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE Master in Economics, 2005. UNIVERSITÀ CATTOLICA, MILAN (ITALY) Laurea (BSc.) summa cum laude in Economics, 2004.
CURRENT POSITION LANCASTER UNIVERSITY From Sep 2010 Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE LANCASTER UNIVERSITY 2010-2011 Lecturer, Intermediate Microeconomics, Industrial Organization UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK 2009-2010 Lecturer, Introductory Microeconomics 2009-2010 TA, Political Economy 2007-2010 TA, Intermediate Microeconomics, , Mathematical Economics 2006-2007 TA, Introduction to Quantitative Economics
OTHER EMPLOYMENTS 2009-2010 Consultant, “Mining for Gold” and “Magellano” Projects, IReR, Milan (Italy) Collecting and evaluating new ideas and experiences of policy close to a “subsidiarian” strategic policy planning (in particular those that can be implemented by the Lombardy government) through the monitoring of think tanks and policy research institutions in the UK. 2009-2010 Teaching Fellow, Department of Economics, University of Warwick 2004 Research Assistant, Faculty of Statistics, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
HONOURS, SCHOLARSHIPS AND FELLOWSHIPS 2005-2008 Marie Curie Early Stage Training Fellowship, University of Warwick 2004-2005 Università Cattolica Scholarship for Postgraduate Studies Abroad (Perfezionamento all’Estero) 2002-2003 Fondazione Famiglia Legnanese. Scholarship for outstanding students, who participated to the Erasmus Exchange Program
COURSES June 2007 Summer School in Fiscal Federalism, IEB, University of Barcelona (Spain)
PRESENTATIONS AT CONFERENCES September 2010 SIEP, Società Italiana di Economia Pubblica, Pavia, Italy April 2009 Royal Economic Society Annual Conference, University of Surrey, UK. February 2009 Public Economics UK PhD Workshop, Institute for Fiscal Studies, London, UK. August 2008 European Economic Association, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy. July 2008 Third World Conference of the Game Theory Society, Northwestern University, IL, USA. June 2008 9th International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. June 2007 Game Theory Festival, Stony Brook, NY, USA.
OTHER EVENTS August 2008 Selected to participate to the 3rd Lindau Meeting of Nobel Prize Winners, Lindau, Germany.
REFEREEING Journal of Public Economic Theory
RESEARCH PAPERS
Optimal Districting with Endogenous Party Platforms (LUMS Working Paper) This paper proposes a theory of socially optimal districting in a simple probabilistic voting model of legislative elections with endogenous party platforms. Two parties compete in a first-past-the-post electoral system, after the social planner has distributed partisan and independent voters across districts. Districting affects the implemented policy through parties' strategic decision of their policy platforms, citizens' voting behaviour and the consequent composition of the elected legislature. The social planner should implement a districting that mirrors the ideological leaning of the population, in order to allow parties to internalise voters' preferences in their policy proposals. The seat-vote curve stemming from this districting is unbiased if voters are risk neutral and, in contrast with the findings of Coate and Knight (2007), who do not allow for endogenous party platforms, biased against the largest partisan group in case of risk-averse voters. These result hold both in case the legislature chooses the policy through majority voting, and when the legislature bargains over the policy to implement as in Coate and Knight (2007). An empirical analysis on a dataset of 28 U.S. State legislative elections from 1992 to 2000 is performed. Through a simple panel data technique and Monte Carlo simulations the partisan composition of each district is inferred from electoral and demographic data at the district level and state-level polls on ideological self-identification. The results obtained are then used to calculate the potential welfare gain from implementing the socially optimal districting plan, through a calibration of the theoretical model. The size of the welfare gain is generally below 1%, even smaller than the one found by Coate and Knight (2007).
Runoff vs. Plurality. The Effect of Electoral Systems on Intergovernmental Grants. Plurality and runoff systems offer very different incentives to parties and coalition of voters, and demand different political strategies from potential candidates. Italian mayors and city councils are elected with a different electoral system according to the locality's population, while grants from the central government to municipalities are supposedly decided irrespective of this difference. We exploit this institutional feature to verify whether the central government discriminates in favor of the smaller or the larger municipalities, i.e. if it invests more in municipalities in which the mayor is elected through a first-past-the-post or a dual-ballot electoral system, and find strong evidence that larger municipalities, whose mayors are elected through a dual-ballot system, are rewarded with more grants than smaller municipalities, whose mayors are elected through plurality rule.
Intergovernmental Grants and Political Alignment: An Empirical Analysis on Italian Municipalities with an Original Database This paper proposes an empirical analysis of intergovernmental grants to Italian municipalities. A new database is built containing political, demographic and financial data on Italian municipalities with more than 15,000 inhabitants between 1998 and 2008. The hypothesis that political alignment between mayors and the Prime Minister determines higher grants from the State to municipalities is tested. The analysis also looks into the channels through which these politically motivated monies reach municipalities. More generally, the economic and political determinants of the grant system are analyzed. Through a panel data regression technique with fixed effects, a strongly significant alignment effect is found amounting to roughly 13% of total grants, together with a bias in favour of mid-size municipalities, which is consistent with anecdotal knowledge. Nevertheless past expenditure patterns and historic sedimentation of unfinished reforms render the whole structure difficult to fully grasp under efficiency, economic, and political criteria.
Elections and the Quality of Politicians This paper concerns the nature of the candidate selection process in politics. The issue at hand is to understand how the competence of candidates and elected politicians is affected by ideological and partisan concerns. Voters have homogenous preferences for more competent candidates, but differing ideologies. We analyze a two-party system in which two parties compete in a first-past-the-post electoral system. Candidates run on exogenous policies, and strategically decide how much to invest in policy design (i.e. ``quality''). Counterintuitively, for some value of the parameters, the more voters are concerned about the ideology of the winning candidate rather than the candidate's quality, the more parties are able to field competent politicians. The effects of a polarized electorate, in which the median voter need not be equidistant from the opposing parties' ideologies, is also analyzed. A non-centrist electorate can have a positive effect on parties' investment in platform design and therefore on the quality of the elected officer.
REFERENCES:
Professor Amrita Dhillon Professor Ben Lockwood Department of Economics Department of Economics University of Warwick University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL Coventry CV4 7AL UK UK Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Office phone number: +44 (0)24 765 23028 Office phone number:+44(0)24 765 23277
Professor Ian Walker Head of Department Department of Economics Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YW UK Email: [email protected] Office phone number: +44 (0)1524 5 92055