My work sits at the intersection of political economy and public economics, with a focus on gender. I study how political institutions and public policy shape — and are shaped by — gender dynamics.
Work in progress
Masculinity Norms and the Far-Right Backlash Against Female Leadership
Does electing a female political leader fuel a far-right backlash? Using a regression discontinuity design on close mixed-gender mayoral races in Italian municipalities, we find that electing a female mayor raises the vote share of Lega - Italy's main populist radical right party - by 2.6 percentage points at the next general election, nearly doubling the average change. To probe the mechanism, we construct novel municipal-level indices of masculinity norms and gender norms, and show that the reaction is concentrated where masculinity norms are stronger and is further amplified by local economic insecurity, while exhibiting no clear gradient along progressive gender norms. This pattern is consistent with a status-threat mechanism: female leadership challenges male social status precisely where dominance norms prescribe that status most strongly, and where its material foundations are most fragile. The results provide causal evidence that advances in women's political leadership generate a far-right electoral backlash, and identify masculinity - rather than gender norms per se - as the cultural margin along which it operates.
This paper estimates the causal effect of easing access to divorce on intimate partner violence (IPV). We study two divorce law reforms approved in Italy that substantially reduced both the monetary costs and mandatory waiting periods required to obtain a divorce, generating a sharp and heterogeneous increase in divorce rates nationwide. Economic theory yields ambiguous predictions: by strengthening outside options, easier divorce may deter violence through intra-household bargaining, yet it may also increase violence if separation triggers coercive control or retaliatory behavior. To address concerns about endogenous reporting of IPV—particularly salient when legal options change—we focus on femicides, the most extreme form of IPV, which, crucially for our purposes, are less subject to underreporting and measurement error. We combine administrative data on the universe of marriages and divorces with administrative and hand-collected data on femicides, and we exploit plausibly exogenous variation across municipalities in the exposure to the reforms arising from aggregate differences in exposure to the reform across age groups interacted with cross-locality differences in the age composition of married couples. We find that greater access to divorce increases the incidence of femicide. The effect is primarily driven by killings perpetrated within the family environment.