RT @VinPons: Thrilled to see our paper published in the American Economic Review!! 👇👇👇.We show that candidates in US and French elections m….

RT @silviavannutell: We are doing it again! Please submit your papers and come see us in Lisbon :).

What do you want to know?.

Thank you @vox_dev for covering our (w Saad Gulzar) work on bureaucrat incentives to reduce crop-related fires and air pollution! Full paper at

Just 3 days left to submit to the 2nd Northeast Political Economy Conference. We (with @briangknight) are inviting work from economists and political scientists on all political economy topics. 📅 Deadline: June 16.📍 Brown University, Oct 3 .🔗

RT @VinPons: Version 2.0 of the National Elections Database is online! We now cover presidential and parliamentary….

Here's last year's program. The conference is generously funded by @BrownUniversity through the Orlando Bravo Center for Economic Research and the @PPE_Center.

📌 Excited to announce the 2nd Northeast Political Economy Conference 📌 We (@briangknight) are seeking submissions from economists & political scientists working on political economy topics. Please submit by June 16 and join us at Brown on Friday, Oct 3

RT @briangknight: Excited to announce the Northeast Political Economy Conference on October 3, 2025 at Brown U, organized by me and @gemmad….

RT @o_garcia_ponce: I just published a new article titled “Criminal Violence, the State, and Society” in @AnnualReviews, which examines the….

10/ This is my job market paper and it owes immensely to my committee Guy Grossman, Dorothy Kronick, and Julia Lynch, and to my Postdoc PI Saad Gulzar. I'm very happy to see it out and wish I could celebrate it with you!.

9/ If you’re interested in the intersection of migration, labor exploitation, and organized crime, check out the full paper here:

8/ 🚨Policy takeaway: Combating organized crime isn’t just about state strength. Reducing reliance on criminal intermediaries requires tackling the conditions that make their services valuable—like migrant labor precarity.

7/ 🌏This has global implications. Similar dynamics could explain how the Italo-American mafia exploited migrant labor in early 20th-century NYC, or how Nigerian gangs control undocumented migrants in Italy today.

6/ 💡Key insight: Mafias don’t just replace weak states. They complementstrong states by enabling illegal activity that would otherwise be too risky. Organized crime should be reconceptualized as both a substitute for weak states and a tool for rule evasion in strong ones.

5/ Using a discontinuous shock affecting constructions and a shift-share instrument, I show that mafia presence increased where:.✅Construction boomed (creating demand for unskilled labor).✅Migration from Southern Italy surged (providing a labor supply mafias could control).

4/ I test this using a novel dataset tracking mafia expansion from the 1960s onward. By scraping historical newspapers and validating with judicial data, I create the first municipal-level, time-varying measure of mafia presence in Italy. 📰

3/ In Northern Italy, mafias expanded where firms needed cheap, informal labor. They supplied it by controlling migrant workers from mafia-affected regions. This allowed local firms to evade labor laws without risk of denunciation.

2/ I argue that criminal groups succeed in strong states by offering a key service: enforcing and hiding illegal transactions. When rule enforcement is strong, breaking the law is costly. Mafias solve this by intermediating in informal markets—like the one for labor.

1/ Conventional wisdom says criminal groups thrive in weak states that fail to provide security and services. But mafias have expanded to strong states like the US, Canada, and Germany. How? 🤔.

🧵 How do criminal organizations expand to strong states? My paper in @The_JOP explains how mafias successfully moved to Northern Italy—by striking deals with local actors and exploiting migrant labor. Thread: ⬇️.