No. 956 - Political selection in the skilled city

by Antonio Accetturo
March 2014
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This paper studies the impact of citizens' human capital on the characteristics of elected politicians in democratic elections for the post of mayor. By using a change in the rules for Italian mayoral elections and a difference-in-differences estimator, I find that cities endowed with a larger amount of human capital tend to elect mayors that have a higher educational attainment and that were previously employed in skill-intensive jobs. This result is quantitatively small but robust to omitted variables or selection issues.

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  1. 28 March 2014
    No. 956 - Political selection in the skilled city
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