Federico Revelli

Close Elections and Voter Turnout Rates

Federico Revelli, in joint work with Tsung-Sheng Tsai (National Taiwan University), has investigated whether the rare occurrence of a local election ending in a tie or being decided by a single vote generates informational spill-overs on nearby localities’ subsequent elections. The researchers developed a model of costly instrumental voting in sequential elections with private information, where voters update their beliefs regarding the distribution of political preferences and the probability of their vote being decisive upon observing the outcome in earlier elections. By exploiting over a hundred exact ties or one-vote-difference outcomes in Italian mayoral elections and the quasi-experimental conditions created by the staggered municipal electoral calendar, the researchers verify whether there is an impact of exposure to spill-overs from the localities experiencing these bizarre electoral outcomes.

During his visit to CESifo, Mr Revelli plans to continue his recent work on the impact of the timing of local elections on the trajectory of public budgets and on the determinants of voter turnout rates in local elections. Otherwise, his main research interests are in applied public economics and the functioning of multi-leveled government structures in particular, including the performance of decentralised governments, tax and yardstick competition, the impact of intergovernmental grants, and the determinants of local election results. His research has appeared in several international journals including the Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Law & Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Urban Economics and the Oxford Economic Papers. He is currently working jointly with Emanuele Bracco (University of Verona) on a book (expected Summer 2019) reviewing the most recent applied econometric research in local public economics, Empirical Fiscal Federalism, for the Cambridge University Press series “Cambridge Elements in Public Economics”.

Federico Revelli holds a PhD in Economics from University College London and is Professor of Public Economics at the University of Torino, where he is currently Head of the Department of Economics and Statistics. He is Member of the Board of Directors of the Centro Studi sul Federalismo (Centre for Studies on Federalism). He is Associate Editor of International Tax and Public Finance and Economia Politica: Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics. He has also served as Guest Editor of Finanz Archiv/Public Finance Analysis.