Essays on political economy, media coverage and economics of crime

This dissertation consists of three self-contained essays on political economy, media coverage and economics of crime. Chapter 1 investigates how immigrant criminality impacts municipality votes during four parliamentary elections in Italy. Focusing on the mass-media channel, I collect newspapers data on crime-related news. Moreover, to construct a novel database on crimes by the perpetrator, the analysis adopts semi-supervised machine learning techniques. In the empirical analysis, I exploit the data granularity to identify short-term deviations from trend in immigrant crime news coverage to estimate the effect of immigrant crimes (conveyed by newspapers) on electoral preferences. The main findings show that exposure to immigrant criminality has a positive and significant impact on the right parties’ votes shares. Second, distinguishing by northern and southern regions, evidence shows that immigrant criminality’s impact is more prominent in the south of Italy. Chapter 2 studies whether the extension of the right of self-defence outside private property affects crime-related outcomes. The introduction of the Stand Your Ground law provides that individuals have the right to use reasonable force, including deadly force, to protect themselves in any place where they have a right to be. We causally identify the consequences of the law introduction on crime-related outcomes in a generalized differencein-differences setting. Findings show that treated counties experience an increase in both homicide rates and white-on-non-white homicide rates. Second, we find a positive impact on violent crime rates but not on property crime rates. Further analysis suggests that the increase in those crimes is motivated by the decrease in the probability of punishment, hate crime bias and racial bias, or high inequality. In Chapter 3, using dictionary matching methods we construct a news-based policy index to investigate the impact of fiscal news on consumption and investments in Italy. We apply an identification strategy that differentiates an unanticipated or surprise shock from a foresight or news shock. We find that differences in the responses to surprise and foresight shocks reflect the role of expectations. Results indicate that the "news" or foresight shock has delayed effects on government spending, as well as on consumption and investments. Nevertheless, the "confidence channel" plays a crucial role in anticipating the effect of the news on future changes in fiscal policy action.