This dissertation presents a theoretical framework about which voters parties distribute to and with which policies. To develop this full framework of distributive policies, the dissertation proceeds in two stages. First, it analyses which voters parties have more incentives to target distributive policies. Second, it also develops the conditions under which political parties can focus exclusively on these voters or need to combine this strategy with appeals to a broader electorate. The first part of the argument analyses which voters parties have at the centre of their distributive strategies, or, in the words of Cox and McCubbins (1986) to whom parties will give an available extra dollar for distribution. The argument is that core voters provide more efficient conditions for distribution, contradicting Stokes’ (2005) claim that a dollar spent on core voters is a wasted dollar. The explanation is twofold. First, core supporters might not vote for another party, but they can get demobilised. Once we include the effects on turnout, core voters are more responsive. Their party identification makes them especially attentive and reactive to economic benefits provided by their party. Secondly, incumbents cannot individually select who receives a distributive policy, and not all voters are equally reachable with distributive policies. When a party provides a policy, it cannot control if some of those resources go to voters the party is not interested in. Core supporters are more homogenous groups with more definable traits, whereas swing voters are a residual category composed by heterogeneous voters with no shared interests. This makes it easier for incumbents to shape distributive benefits that target core voters more exclusively. These mechanisms define the general distribution hypothesis: parties will focus on core voters, by targeting their distributive strategies to them. The second part of the dissertation develops the conditions under which politicians stick to this distributive strategy or, instead, would provide more universalistic spending to a more undefined set of recipients. The conventional argument explaining this choice relies on the electoral system, arguing that proportional systems give more incentives to provide universalistic policies than majoritarian systems. This dissertation challenges this argument and provides two other contextual conditions that define when parties have a stronger interest in their core supporters or in a more general electorate. First, the geographic distribution of core supporters across districts is a crucial piece of information to know the best distributive strategy. When parties’ core supporters are geographically concentrated, they cannot simply rely on them, as the party will always fall short of districts to win the election. Therefore, parties will have greater incentives to expand their electorate by buying off other voters. This should reduce the predicted differences between electoral systems in the provision of universalistic programmes. Secondly, the policy positions of candidates are a result of strategic considerations that respond to other candidates’ positions. Thus, I argue that parties adapt their distributive strategies to the number of competing parties, independently of the electoral system. In a two-party scenario, parties need broader coalitions of electoral support. In equilibrium, any vote can change the electoral outcome. As more parties compete, the breadth of parties’ electorates is reduced and parties will find narrow distributive policies more profitable. In summary, the main contribution of this dissertation one is to provide a new framework to study distributive politics. This framework makes innovations both on the characterisation of swing and core electoral groups, and the rationale of parties’ distributive strategies, contributing to advance previous theoretical and empirical research.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse empirically, proposing new methods to tackle disputed questions in the literature of political and labour economics, the Italian institutional setting both in a political competition context and in the occupational structure. The first paper explores the relationship between transfers from central state to political aligned municipalities and the effect of these transfers on local electoral consensus. This study contributes to the empirical literature of the political determinants of spikes in central transfers in pre-electoral periods and of the electoral benefits of pork barrel measures for incumbent politicians. Despite several findings of strong evidence that intergovernmental fiscal transfers rise during election years, in the Italian case researchers investigated little the political incentives that lay behind these increases or the success of these transfers in attracting votes. We focus on the so called swing municipalities, defined as those in which the probability of winning is close to one-half, analysing data of Italian comuni with more than 15 000 inhabitants, in the period 2007-2014. From an empirical perspective, every attempt to estimate the causal impact of political alignment on the amount of federal transfers is clearly complicated by endogeneity issues. Without a credible source of exogenous variation in political alignment, the empirical correlation between alignment and transfers (if any) can be completely driven by socio-economic factors influencing both dimensions. We propose a new model specification to account for the endogeneity issue arising when estimating the causal impact of political alignment on transfers: the unpredicted change in the government occurred in 2011 after the resignation of Silvio Berlusconi and the following appointment of Mario Monti as prime minister. We perform our empirical estimation in two steps: first, we apply the close-race RDD setup (Lee 2008) to assess the impact of political alignment on transfers. Results from the close-race RDD show that aligned municipalities receive more grants, with this effect being stronger before elections. At a second empirical stage, we perform a local linear regression of the re-election probability of the local incumbent on transfers, including the first stage error term to have our coefficient of interest measuring only the effect of politically-driven transfers on electoral outcomes, and we conclude that this probability increases as grants increase. The second paper stems from the observation of the most recent phenomena in the domestic and foreign labour market: technological progress has been associated to a crowding-out of cognitive-skill intensive jobs in favour of jobs requiring soft skills, such as social intelligence, flexibility and creativity. Soft skills can be defined as interpersonal, human, people or behavioural skills necessary for applying technical skills and knowledge in the workplace. The nature of the soft skills make them hardly replaceable by machine work, and Among soft skills, creativity is one of the hardest to define and to codify, therefore, creativity-intensive occupations have been shielded from automation. In our work, we focus on creativity, starting from its definition in order to get significant insights on which occupational profiles in Italy can be considered creative and to explore their dynamics in the labour market. A possible analytical definition of creativity comes from the seminal work of Edward De Bono. According to his pioneering research in the field, lateral thinking is strictly related to creativity and it can be described along four dimensions: 1) fluidity, as the ability of a subject to give the highest possible number of answers to a certain question; 2) flexibility, as the number of categories to which we can bring back these questions; 3) originality: ability of expressing new and innovative ideas; 4) processing: ability of realizing concretely one’s ideas. We apply this definition to a uniquely detailed occupational dataset on tasks, skills, work attitudes, and working conditions regarding all Italian occupations: the Inapp-Istat Survey on Occupations (Indagine Campionaria sulle Professioni, ICP hereafter), an O*NET-type dataset developed by the Italian National Institute for Public Policy Analysis. The Survey on Occupations, in fact, presents a list of skills and competences and workers are asked to identify those they make use of in performing their job. Inside this list, we identify 25 skills associated to creativity and we formulate a Matrix Completion (MC) optimization problem, as discussed theoretically in Mazumder (2010). Matrix Completion is the task of filling in the missing entries of a partially observed matrix, which we generate by obscuring randomly 10%, 25% and 50% of the entries in the columns associated with the creative skills, given a fixed row (occupation). In our analysis, we use a formulation of the problem known as Nuclear Norm Minimization and we solve it with the Soft Impute Algorithm. We conclude our analysis on social skills in our third paper where we analyse the effects of Covid-19 pandemic on soft skills in the context of Italian occupations, operating in about 100 economic sectors. We leverage detailed information from ICP, the Italian O*Net, and we simulate the impact of Covid-19 on those workplace characteristics and working style that were more seriously hit by the lockdown measures and the new sanitary dispositions (physical proximity, face-to-face discussions, working remotely, ecc.). We simulate three possible scenarios based on the intensity of the effects of COVID-19 on some working conditions, such as working from home, keeping physical distance and so on. We then apply matrix completion, a machine learning technique used in recommendation systems, in order to predict the levels of soft skills required for each occupation when working conditions change, as these changes might be persistent in the near future. Professions showing a lower intensity in the use of soft skills, with respect to the predicted one, are exposed to a deficit in their soft-skill endowment, which might ultimately lead to lower productivity or higher unemployment, thus enhancing the negative effects of the pandemic.

Submitted by Rodrigo Simonaio Morata (rmorata@gmail.com) on 2017-02-16T16:40:53Z No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCAL DE NASCIMENTO E TRANSFERENCIAS CONVENIADAS.pdf: 432198 bytes, checksum: ea42bcb5bbddd6e2add57e2fcbbd1d08 (MD5) / Rejected by Renata de Souza Nascimento (renata.souza@fgv.br), reason: Rodrigo, boa tarde Seu trabalho foi rejeitado por não estar de acordo com as normas da ABNT. Efetuar as seguintes alterações: - Retirar a acentuação do nome Getúlio. - Na capa, abaixo do nome da Fundação é necessário retirar o nome do curso (mestrado profissional) e incluir o nome da escola (ESCOLA DE ECONOMIA DE SÃO PAULO). - Nas páginas que constam o nome da cidade, retirar a sigla SP que consta ao lado. - Alterar a numeração das páginas: por exemplo, se a Introdução foi a página 9, incluir o número e seguir. - Verificar o tamanho da Fonte utilizada, que também precisa estar de acordo com as normas. ABNT: http://sistema.bibliotecas-sp.fgv.br/bkab_normalizacao clicar em Normas para Apresentação de Monografias - página 12. Em seguida, submeter o trabalho novamente. Att on 2017-02-17T18:38:33Z (GMT) / Submitted by Rodrigo Simonaio Morata (rmorata@gmail.com) on 2017-02-20T00:20:53Z No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCALDENASCIMENTOETRANSFERENCIASCONVENIADASv1.pdf: 966739 bytes, checksum: 8b8fda4c7da9b76fb7063b1c7c754fcf (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Renata de Souza Nascimento (renata.souza@fgv.br) on 2017-02-20T16:28:24Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCALDENASCIMENTOETRANSFERENCIASCONVENIADASv1.pdf: 966739 bytes, checksum: 8b8fda4c7da9b76fb7063b1c7c754fcf (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-02-20T17:43:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 LOCALDENASCIMENTOETRANSFERENCIASCONVENIADASv1.pdf: 966739 bytes, checksum: 8b8fda4c7da9b76fb7063b1c7c754fcf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-07 / O presente trabalho tem como objetivo avaliar se o local de nascimento de deputados federais e senadores influenciam nas transferências conveniadas celebradas entre o governo federal e o governo municipal. Para isto, elaborou-se um banco de dados contendo dados pessoais dos deputados federais e senadores eleitos no período entre 1998 e 2010, além de informações dos prefeitos, governadores, presidentes, dados socioeconômicos e valores pagos via convênios para o mesmo período. Utilizou-se dados do DATASUS, RAIS, banco de dados do TSE e dados do Portal da Transparência para esta elaboração. Aplicou-se painéis de efeito fixo tanto para os deputados federais quanto para os senadores, variandose o tipo de convênio celebrado. Estes foram segmentados nos seguintes grupos: valor total liberado entre a União e os municípios, o total liberado entre cada Poder (Executivo, Legislativo e Judiciário) e os municípios e sobre o recurso liberado por tipo de custeio (Custeio e Não-Custeio) entre a União e os municípios. Os resultados sugerem que, na maioria dos casos, o local de nascimento independentemente de onde tenha sido eleito o parlamentar, possui impacto positivo e significante na celebração de convênios, que pode variar entre R$ 4,60 a R$ 32,25 per capita. Quando considera-se a região de eleição, o local de nascimento de deputados possui impacto significativo em cerca de R$ 0,21 per capita em acordos com o Poder Legislativo e entre tratados cujo objetivo seja de não custeio (aproximadamente, R$ 50,00 per capita). Já para os senadores, os resultados são não conclusivos. / The present study aims to evaluate if the birthplaces of federal deputies and senators are favored in the allocation of federal government transfers. For this purpose, was created a database containing personal data of federal deputies and senators elected in the period between 1998 and 2010, as well as information from mayors, governors, presidents, socioeconomic data and amounts paid through federal transfers for the same period. It was collected data from DATASUS, RAIS, TSE database and Portal da Transparência website. To estimate the impact, fixed-effect panels were applied to both federal deputies and senators. The regressions differ from each other depending of the kind of transfer used. These were segmented into the following groups: total amount released between Union and municipalities, the total released between each Power (Executive, Legislative and Judiciary) and municipalities and the released according to the destination of the transfer (Costing1 and Non-Costing) between Union and municipalities. It was indicated that, in most cases, the town of birth regardless of where the parliamentarian was elected, has a positive and significant impact on the transfers agreements, which can vary from R$ 4.60 to R$ 32.25 per capita. When faced with the region of election, the place of birth of deputies has a significant impact of around R$ 0.21 per capita in agreements with the Legislative Branch and in Non-Costing transfers (approximately R $ 50.00 per capita). But for the senators, no conclusion was presumed.