Gemma Dipoppa

Brian Knight and I are excited to announce the 3rd Northeast Political Economy Conference (NPEC), Oct 2, 2026 @BrownUniversity. Interdisciplinary (Econ + Poli Sci), 8 presentations, with keynotes by Rafaela Dancygier and Jesse Shapiro. Please submit by June 5: forms.gle/udPjigwcvFz9...

The conference is generously funded by Brown University through the Orlando Bravo Center for Economic Research and the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

🚨 New WP 🚨: All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why? We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy. 🧵 1/11

11/ 🎯 The takeaway: States use surveillance as a preventive tool against the empowerment of educated but excluded groups. 👉 As excluded groups gain political empowerment, surveillance may reproduce inequalities by silencing them exactly as they gain political voice.

🚨 New WP 🚨: All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why? We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy. 🧵 1/11

9/ ➡️ Result 3: Across 5 indicators of political activism—voting, protests, strikes, holding political roles, and armed resistance—educated cohorts did not become more engaged. Surveillance expanded preventively, not in reaction to mobilization.

🚨 New WP 🚨: All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why? We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy. 🧵 1/11

7/ The effect persists even when individuals move elsewhere, in line with surveillance following a portable asset (education) rather than municipal-level changes.

🚨 New WP 🚨: All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why? We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy. 🧵 1/11

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.

🚨 New WP 🚨: All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why? We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy. 🧵 1/11

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. 📚

🚨 New WP 🚨: All states monitor the political activity of their citizens. But who do they choose to surveil, and why? We study this question with the universe of Italian political surveillance files: 152,000 individuals born 1816–1932, across democracy and autocracy. 🧵 1/11

📌 Excited to announce the 2nd Northeast Political Economy Conference 📌 We (briangknight.bsky.social) 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 forms.gle/i4wi88Q6P3tJ...

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

9/ If you’re interested in the intersection of migration, labor exploitation, and organized crime, check out the full paper here: 🔖 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

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

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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

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? 🤔