Mr Guglielmo Cori (p)

This paper examines the fiscal consequences of dissolving Italian municipal unions (Unioni di Comuni), a form of inter-municipal cooperation in which municipalities jointly provide selected public services while retaining substantial political and administrative autonomy. I build a new dataset of union dissolutions over recent decades and classify each episode by the crisis that triggered it using official documents and local news sources. A core focus is on politically driven breakups: dissolutions following unexpected and abrupt shifts in political control, proxied by razor-thin municipal elections in at least one member municipality, which plausibly disrupt coordination within the union. I merge these data with municipal budget records to construct function-specific per-capita expenditures for the former union area and track how spending is reallocated when service provision returns to individual member municipalities. I estimate average and dynamic (event-time) effects using synthetic difference-in-differences, reweighting stable unions to match pre-dissolution trajectories and applying standard difference-in-differences adjustments. I assess identification via pre-trend and placebo tests. I also compare politically triggered dissolutions with more routine dissolution episodes to evaluate whether political shocks are associated with distinct short-run post-breakup spending patterns in the aftermath, and I examine heterogeneity across service domains, local fiscal capacity, and baseline spending levels.

Prof. Silvia Cerisola (p), Prof. Roberta Capello

The socio-economic development literature widely acknowledges that cultural heritage and cultural initiatives may help to bring about major economic and social benefits. Since 1985, the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) programme of the EU promotes annual cultural events in different European cities, or partner cities and towns. The aim is twofold. On the one hand to promote and celebrate Europe’s rich cultural diversity and heritage, mutual understanding and intercultural dialogue, with cities at the centre of cultural life across Europe. On the other hand, particularly since the 1990s, to foster the contribution of culture to the regeneration of local/regional economies and their sustainable socio-economic development. However, the empirical research on the impact of ECoCs on local economies suggests that while cultural activities may contribute to wellbeing and short-term benefits, they tend to have limited or mainly temporary impacts on local economies, with little evidence of wider territorial sustainability effects regarding economic transformation and long-term socio-economic development. In this regard, the overall objective of the present study is to collect territorial evidence on how the cultural development initiatives promoted with ECoC in the case of Guimarães (ECoC in 2012), contributed to improve long-run territorial development both in the host city and in its surrounding region. Spill-over effects are in fact explored, examining how the ECoC initiative in Guimarães influenced cultural, economic, and social transformations at both urban and regional levels. Particularly, the quantitative analysis makes use of the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), which estimates counterfactual trends, allowing the identification of net changes in key indicators—such as employment, value added, and tourism flows—relative to a statistically constructed control group of similar territories. The methodology is applied to NUTS3 regions and spillovers from the NUTS3 region hosting the event on the remaining areas of the wider NUTS2 region where the ECoC is located are also measured.

Prof. Artem Korzhenevych (p), Dr. Feng Wei

Based on a conceptual framework derived from the Push-Pull Theory and leveraging the China’s Giant Panda National Park (GPNP) pilot program as a quasi-experiment, this paper analyzes the impact of environmental regulation related to biodiversity protection on rural-urban population dynamics. Employing a difference-in-differences approach with county-level panel data from Sichuan Province (2013–2022), we find that the GPNP reduces population by 4.1% on average, mainly from rural loss due to sharply declining agricultural productivity, especially in agriculture-dependent counties. However, urban population increases in the GPNP pilot counties with large, dense urban areas, strong transport links, and urban-biased policies. The results suggest that regulation may impoverish rather than depopulate rural regions, and thus requires additional compensation schemes.