8/ ➡️ Result 2:
Who faced the brunt of surveillance? The working class. The newly educated poor were watched longer, more harshly, and more intensively, consistently with the state fearing their empowerment.

6/ We present 3 results:

➡️ Result 1:

Municipality-cohorts exposed to more schooling were 64% more likely to be surveilled.

The effect increases as the state expands education and disappears when later reforms equalize schooling across municipalities.

5/ 🎲 The shock:

The Casati Law mandated primary schooling for 2 years everywhere but extended it for +2 years in towns >4,000 inhabitants and cohorts born post 1854.

We show the reform reduced illiteracy and use it in a difference-in-discontinuity design by population and cohort.

3/ Unsupervised LLM on 1,200+ police files shows that mobilization capacity – and a particular marker of it, education, – together with potential for subversion are recurring traits noted by the surveillance state. 📚

Here's last year's program. The conference is generously funded by Brown University through the Orlando Bravo Center for Economic Research and the PPE Center

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. 📰

Female politicians face an additional gender gap: they are 3️⃣ times more likely to experience violence while in office.

We study the reasons and consequences of violence in a new paper, summarized in this column cepr.org/voxeu/column...

With @mpulejo.bsky.social and Gianmarco Daniele