Lost in Corruption. Evidence from EU Funding to Southern Italy

Does EU regional policy promote local TFP growth? Evidence from the Italian Mezzogiorno

“…A non‐negligible fraction of the EU budget is lost every year in fraud and corruption (almost 1 billion euro, according to the European Anti‐Fraud Office, OLAF). According to the evidence provided in De Angelis, de Blasio, and Rizzica (2020), corruption is fuelled only by transfers intended to finance public works (no effect is found for funds received for purchases of goods and services and subsidies to firms and households).…”

Gotham city. Predicting ‘corrupted’ municipalities with machine learning

“…13 We also implemented a simpler logit model with only a limited set of predictors typically associated with corruption crimes. Specifically, we ran a model with a similar vector of covariates (population, employment and unemployment rates, educational attainment variables) to that included in the specification adopted by De Angelis et al (2020). In this case, the out-of-sample sensitivity performance of this basic model was substantially worse than that of the classification tree for both outcome variables in all years.…”

The impact of place‐based policies on interpersonal income inequality

“…De Angelis et al . (2020) find that the disbursement of EU funds in Italy is systematically associated with an increase in the number of white‐collar crimes in the recipient municipality. Ultimately, it is possible that the improvement in the distribution of income that follows the contraction of European funds has to be considered in relation to the decrease in the rent‐seeking generated by the European cohesion policy.…”