Marco Percoco
Biographic Data
| ID | 1174794 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marco Percoco |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marco |
| FAMILY NAME | Percoco |
| SIGNATURE | PERCOCO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Bocconi University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5059-8352 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 157 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Soil aridification, precipitation, and infant health
While research has studied the effects of climate variation on child nutrition, the role of soil moisture and degradation in shaping child well-being remains relatively understudied. Combining climate and infant health data from Africa, we show that rainfall’s health benefits are mediated by potential evapotranspiration (PET), highlighting the importance of soil-retained moisture. Infants born in areas of greater PET face higher risks of being un…
Desertification, crop yield and economic development
This study uses a global grid-level dataset, integrating gross domestic product (GDP) per capita with crop yield and climate variables to examine the economic impact of climate-induced desertification. We use the aridity index (AI) to measure desertification and find that annual variations of soil aridity have a more significant economic impact than precipitation and temperature when taken alone, with Africa experiencing the most significant effe…
Drought and aridity influence internal migration worldwide
The long-term economic effects of aridification
The Political Consequences of Green Policies
For many governments, enacting green policies is a priority, but such policies often impose on citizens substantial and uneven costs. How does the introduction of green policies affect voting? We study this question in the context of a major ban on polluting cars introduced in Milan, which was strongly opposed by the populist right party Lega. Using several inferential strategies, we show that owners of banned vehicles-who incurred a median loss …
Resilience to health shocks and the spatial extent of local labour markets
In addition to the general issue that fewer interpersonal contacts reduce the speed of contagion, less attention has been paid to the spatial configuration of such contacts. In Italy, Covid-19 severely affected the most industrialized area of the country, where the network of commuting flows is particularly dense. We investigate the relationship between workers’ mobility and the diffusion of the disease by computing, for each municipality, the in…
Land invasions and land reform in Basilicata, Italy
The paper analyses the political economy that characterized the design and implementation of a particular place-based policy aimed at addressing wealth inequality, that is, land reform. It focuses on Basilicata in the Italian south, where massive land invasions took place between December 1949 and March 1950 in reaction to long-lasting and extreme inequality. The invading peasants were solicited and even coordinated by local Communist Party leade…
Plague and long-term development
This article aims to analyse the effects of plague on the long-term development of Italian cities, with particular attention to the 1629-30 epidemic. By using a new dataset on plague mortality rates in 56 cities covering the period c. 1575-1700, an economic geography model verifying the existence of multiple equilibria is estimated. It is found that cities severely affected by the 1629-30 plague were displaced to a lower growth path. It is also f…
Who welcomes them? Determinants of the spatial distribution of asylum seekers in Italy
This paper investigates the institutional and socioeconomic determinants of the location of asylum seekers in the case of Italy, where a complex multilevel system of hosting has been established to address the pressure of arrivals. In this system, asylum seekers are allocated to local communities through periodic calls (i.e., with a bottom-up procedure where communities bid for them). This results in an interesting circumstance in which local att…
Wealth inequality, redistribution and local development
The role of wealth inequality for local development has long been neglected, although some literature has pointed out its relevance in explaining entrepreneurial and education investment. Among the typologies of assets composing individuals’ wealth, land is of paramount importance in underdeveloped economies specialised in agriculture. Land reforms in terms of redistribution of land ownership are hence expected to boost development through an inc…
Agenda setting and the political economy of fear
In this article, we analyse the mechanisms of agenda setting by focusing on the determinants of individual attitudes towards crime and investigating the role played by the media. After a brief literature review supporting the relevance of the selected topic of inquiry and the presentation of our analytical framework, we study the persuasion effects of mass media. More specifically, we investigate how TV exposure can shape individual perceptions o…
Labour Market Institutions
The current economic crisis has had spatially differentiated impacts in both the US and Europe. A growing collection of literature investigates the determinants of the magnitude of this recession across regions. This paper aims to contribute to this literature by analysing variations in unemployment rate across European regions over the period 2004–11. In particular, we focus on two apparently neglected issues, namely labour market rigidity and t…
Impact of European Cohesion Policy on regional growth
Impact of European Cohesion Policy on regional growth: does local economic structure matter? Regional Studies. A growing body of literature has analysed the effect of European Cohesion Policy on regional gross domestic product (GDP) growth. The paper contributes to this literature by discussing Structural Funds and assigning an explicit role to the choice of strategy and the economic structure of regions. In particular, adopting a regression disc…
The impact of European Cohesion Policy in urban and rural regions
The impact of European Cohesion Policy in urban and rural regions. Regional Studies. This paper presents an evaluation exercise on the impact of European Cohesion Policy on the economic performance of the most disadvantaged European areas (Objective 1 regions) for the programming period 2000–06. By performing the analysis at NUTS-3 rather than NUTS-2 level to exploit the exogeneity of the treatment status in the context of a regression discontinu…
Heterogeneity in the reaction of traffic flows to road pricing
Highways, local economic structure and urban development
Transport costs are widely considered as a key driver of competitive advantage of countries, regions and cities. Their relevance is even greater when scale economies are at work since production is concentrated and goods must be shipped. Recent literature has found that highways, by decreasing transport costs, are crucial in influencing agglomeration economies and ultimately urban development. In this article, we contribute to this literature by …
Temporal aggregation and spatio-temporal traffic modeling
Health Shocks and Human Capital Accumulation
Percoco M. Health shocks and human capital accumulation: the case of Spanish flu in Italian regions, Regional Studies. The impact of health on economic development is a hotly debated issue in the economics literature, with most scholars supporting the idea that the diffusion of diseases is detrimental to development. In this context, pandemics are an important case study given their exogenous nature, which makes identification of the impact of di…
Path dependence, institutions and the density of economic activities
Local Labour Markets and the Interregional Mobility of Italian University Students
This paper looks at a little-explored role that universities can play: that of representing a channel for brain gain, enabling regions to attract bright students who may decide to stay after they have graduated. In this way, universities can be a source of selective migration processes and possibly of diverging development paths, by augmenting the capability of economically dynamic regions to attract bright people from the lagging regions. In thi…
Strategies of regional development in European regions
A wealth of literature has focused on the effectiveness of cohesion policy for regional development. However, most studies have neglected the heterogeneous nature of such interventions. In this article, we study such heterogeneity by identifying different development strategies put in place by regional governments. In particular, by using expenditure allocation by region and by item over the period 2000–2006, we identify regions with similar deve…
Selective Migration, Regional Growth and Convergence
Fratesi U. and Percoco M. Selective migration, regional growth and convergence: evidence from Italy, Regional Studies. This paper studies the link between regional disparities and migration flows, focusing on the skill content of migration. Disparities may lead to migration, which should reduce them; but at the same time if migration is skill-selective, it may have an opposite effect and reinforce the richest regions. The object of this empirical…
Social Capital and the Innovative Performance of Italian Provinces
Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature due to the lack of consensus on the most suitable operationalisation for the analysis of innovative dynamics. This paper aims to fill this gap by looking at social capital as propensity towards civicness and prosocial behaviour that facilitates the circulation of nonredundant knowledge among otherwise disconnected groups. The quantitative analysis of the innovative perf…
The Fight Against Disease
Malaria is thought to be strictly related to underdevelopment and poverty, and its geographically related origin is now widely recognized. That is, it is endemic only in certain areas of the globe, with environmental and climatic characteristics that are ideal for the proliferation of mosquitoes, which are the vector for transmitting the disease. This feature is the main reason why a large body of economic literature uses mortality from malaria a…
Airport Activity and Local Development
The role of infrastructure as a factor of growth and development of countries and regions is often considered to be crucial. Among the various types of transport infrastructure, airports are considered as particularly strategic because of the increasing importance of air transport in connecting territories. This paper studies the impact of airports on Italian provinces. To this end, it builds on the framework proposed by Brueckner, where sectoral…
Selective Migration, Regional Growth and Convergence
Fratesi U. and Percoco M. Selective migration, regional growth and convergence: evidence from Italy, Regional Studies. This paper studies the link between regional disparities and migration flows, focusing on the skill content of migration. Disparities may lead to migration, which should reduce them; but at the same time if migration is skill-selective, it may have an opposite effect and reinforce the richest regions. The object of this empirical…
The Political Consequences of Green Policies
For many governments, enacting green policies is a priority, but such policies often impose on citizens substantial and uneven costs. How does the introduction of green policies affect voting? We study this question in the context of a major ban on polluting cars introduced in Milan, which was strongly opposed by the populist right party Lega. Using several inferential strategies, we show that owners of banned vehicles-who incurred a median loss …
The impact of European Cohesion Policy in urban and rural regions
The impact of European Cohesion Policy in urban and rural regions. Regional Studies. This paper presents an evaluation exercise on the impact of European Cohesion Policy on the economic performance of the most disadvantaged European areas (Objective 1 regions) for the programming period 2000–06. By performing the analysis at NUTS-3 rather than NUTS-2 level to exploit the exogeneity of the treatment status in the context of a regression discontinu…
Plague and long-term development
This article aims to analyse the effects of plague on the long-term development of Italian cities, with particular attention to the 1629-30 epidemic. By using a new dataset on plague mortality rates in 56 cities covering the period c. 1575-1700, an economic geography model verifying the existence of multiple equilibria is estimated. It is found that cities severely affected by the 1629-30 plague were displaced to a lower growth path. It is also f…
Impact of European Cohesion Policy on regional growth
Impact of European Cohesion Policy on regional growth: does local economic structure matter? Regional Studies. A growing body of literature has analysed the effect of European Cohesion Policy on regional gross domestic product (GDP) growth. The paper contributes to this literature by discussing Structural Funds and assigning an explicit role to the choice of strategy and the economic structure of regions. In particular, adopting a regression disc…
Social Capital and the Innovative Performance of Italian Provinces
Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature due to the lack of consensus on the most suitable operationalisation for the analysis of innovative dynamics. This paper aims to fill this gap by looking at social capital as propensity towards civicness and prosocial behaviour that facilitates the circulation of nonredundant knowledge among otherwise disconnected groups. The quantitative analysis of the innovative perf…
Who welcomes them? Determinants of the spatial distribution of asylum seekers in Italy
This paper investigates the institutional and socioeconomic determinants of the location of asylum seekers in the case of Italy, where a complex multilevel system of hosting has been established to address the pressure of arrivals. In this system, asylum seekers are allocated to local communities through periodic calls (i.e., with a bottom-up procedure where communities bid for them). This results in an interesting circumstance in which local att…
Highways, local economic structure and urban development
Transport costs are widely considered as a key driver of competitive advantage of countries, regions and cities. Their relevance is even greater when scale economies are at work since production is concentrated and goods must be shipped. Recent literature has found that highways, by decreasing transport costs, are crucial in influencing agglomeration economies and ultimately urban development. In this article, we contribute to this literature by …
Health Shocks and Human Capital Accumulation
Percoco M. Health shocks and human capital accumulation: the case of Spanish flu in Italian regions, Regional Studies. The impact of health on economic development is a hotly debated issue in the economics literature, with most scholars supporting the idea that the diffusion of diseases is detrimental to development. In this context, pandemics are an important case study given their exogenous nature, which makes identification of the impact of di…
Airport Activity and Local Development
The role of infrastructure as a factor of growth and development of countries and regions is often considered to be crucial. Among the various types of transport infrastructure, airports are considered as particularly strategic because of the increasing importance of air transport in connecting territories. This paper studies the impact of airports on Italian provinces. To this end, it builds on the framework proposed by Brueckner, where sectoral…
Resilience to health shocks and the spatial extent of local labour markets
In addition to the general issue that fewer interpersonal contacts reduce the speed of contagion, less attention has been paid to the spatial configuration of such contacts. In Italy, Covid-19 severely affected the most industrialized area of the country, where the network of commuting flows is particularly dense. We investigate the relationship between workers’ mobility and the diffusion of the disease by computing, for each municipality, the in…
Path dependence, institutions and the density of economic activities
Land invasions and land reform in Basilicata, Italy
The paper analyses the political economy that characterized the design and implementation of a particular place-based policy aimed at addressing wealth inequality, that is, land reform. It focuses on Basilicata in the Italian south, where massive land invasions took place between December 1949 and March 1950 in reaction to long-lasting and extreme inequality. The invading peasants were solicited and even coordinated by local Communist Party leade…
Labour Market Institutions
The current economic crisis has had spatially differentiated impacts in both the US and Europe. A growing collection of literature investigates the determinants of the magnitude of this recession across regions. This paper aims to contribute to this literature by analysing variations in unemployment rate across European regions over the period 2004–11. In particular, we focus on two apparently neglected issues, namely labour market rigidity and t…
Strategies of regional development in European regions
A wealth of literature has focused on the effectiveness of cohesion policy for regional development. However, most studies have neglected the heterogeneous nature of such interventions. In this article, we study such heterogeneity by identifying different development strategies put in place by regional governments. In particular, by using expenditure allocation by region and by item over the period 2000–2006, we identify regions with similar deve…
The Fight Against Disease
Malaria is thought to be strictly related to underdevelopment and poverty, and its geographically related origin is now widely recognized. That is, it is endemic only in certain areas of the globe, with environmental and climatic characteristics that are ideal for the proliferation of mosquitoes, which are the vector for transmitting the disease. This feature is the main reason why a large body of economic literature uses mortality from malaria a…
Airport Activity and Local Development
The role of infrastructure as a factor of growth and development of countries and regions is often considered to be crucial. Among the various types of transport infrastructure, airports are considered as particularly strategic because of the increasing importance of air transport in connecting territories. This paper studies the impact of airports on Italian provinces. To this end, it builds on the framework proposed by Brueckner, where sectoral…
Local Labour Markets and the Interregional Mobility of Italian University Students
This paper looks at a little-explored role that universities can play: that of representing a channel for brain gain, enabling regions to attract bright students who may decide to stay after they have graduated. In this way, universities can be a source of selective migration processes and possibly of diverging development paths, by augmenting the capability of economically dynamic regions to attract bright people from the lagging regions. In thi…
Strategies of regional development in European regions
A wealth of literature has focused on the effectiveness of cohesion policy for regional development. However, most studies have neglected the heterogeneous nature of such interventions. In this article, we study such heterogeneity by identifying different development strategies put in place by regional governments. In particular, by using expenditure allocation by region and by item over the period 2000–2006, we identify regions with similar deve…
Selective Migration, Regional Growth and Convergence
Fratesi U. and Percoco M. Selective migration, regional growth and convergence: evidence from Italy, Regional Studies. This paper studies the link between regional disparities and migration flows, focusing on the skill content of migration. Disparities may lead to migration, which should reduce them; but at the same time if migration is skill-selective, it may have an opposite effect and reinforce the richest regions. The object of this empirical…
Social Capital and the Innovative Performance of Italian Provinces
Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature due to the lack of consensus on the most suitable operationalisation for the analysis of innovative dynamics. This paper aims to fill this gap by looking at social capital as propensity towards civicness and prosocial behaviour that facilitates the circulation of nonredundant knowledge among otherwise disconnected groups. The quantitative analysis of the innovative perf…
The Fight Against Disease
Malaria is thought to be strictly related to underdevelopment and poverty, and its geographically related origin is now widely recognized. That is, it is endemic only in certain areas of the globe, with environmental and climatic characteristics that are ideal for the proliferation of mosquitoes, which are the vector for transmitting the disease. This feature is the main reason why a large body of economic literature uses mortality from malaria a…
Path dependence, institutions and the density of economic activities
Heterogeneity in the reaction of traffic flows to road pricing
Highways, local economic structure and urban development
Transport costs are widely considered as a key driver of competitive advantage of countries, regions and cities. Their relevance is even greater when scale economies are at work since production is concentrated and goods must be shipped. Recent literature has found that highways, by decreasing transport costs, are crucial in influencing agglomeration economies and ultimately urban development. In this article, we contribute to this literature by …
Temporal aggregation and spatio-temporal traffic modeling
Health Shocks and Human Capital Accumulation
Percoco M. Health shocks and human capital accumulation: the case of Spanish flu in Italian regions, Regional Studies. The impact of health on economic development is a hotly debated issue in the economics literature, with most scholars supporting the idea that the diffusion of diseases is detrimental to development. In this context, pandemics are an important case study given their exogenous nature, which makes identification of the impact of di…
Labour Market Institutions
The current economic crisis has had spatially differentiated impacts in both the US and Europe. A growing collection of literature investigates the determinants of the magnitude of this recession across regions. This paper aims to contribute to this literature by analysing variations in unemployment rate across European regions over the period 2004–11. In particular, we focus on two apparently neglected issues, namely labour market rigidity and t…
Impact of European Cohesion Policy on regional growth
Impact of European Cohesion Policy on regional growth: does local economic structure matter? Regional Studies. A growing body of literature has analysed the effect of European Cohesion Policy on regional gross domestic product (GDP) growth. The paper contributes to this literature by discussing Structural Funds and assigning an explicit role to the choice of strategy and the economic structure of regions. In particular, adopting a regression disc…
The impact of European Cohesion Policy in urban and rural regions
The impact of European Cohesion Policy in urban and rural regions. Regional Studies. This paper presents an evaluation exercise on the impact of European Cohesion Policy on the economic performance of the most disadvantaged European areas (Objective 1 regions) for the programming period 2000–06. By performing the analysis at NUTS-3 rather than NUTS-2 level to exploit the exogeneity of the treatment status in the context of a regression discontinu…
Wealth inequality, redistribution and local development
The role of wealth inequality for local development has long been neglected, although some literature has pointed out its relevance in explaining entrepreneurial and education investment. Among the typologies of assets composing individuals’ wealth, land is of paramount importance in underdeveloped economies specialised in agriculture. Land reforms in terms of redistribution of land ownership are hence expected to boost development through an inc…
Agenda setting and the political economy of fear
In this article, we analyse the mechanisms of agenda setting by focusing on the determinants of individual attitudes towards crime and investigating the role played by the media. After a brief literature review supporting the relevance of the selected topic of inquiry and the presentation of our analytical framework, we study the persuasion effects of mass media. More specifically, we investigate how TV exposure can shape individual perceptions o…
Who welcomes them? Determinants of the spatial distribution of asylum seekers in Italy
This paper investigates the institutional and socioeconomic determinants of the location of asylum seekers in the case of Italy, where a complex multilevel system of hosting has been established to address the pressure of arrivals. In this system, asylum seekers are allocated to local communities through periodic calls (i.e., with a bottom-up procedure where communities bid for them). This results in an interesting circumstance in which local att…
Land invasions and land reform in Basilicata, Italy
The paper analyses the political economy that characterized the design and implementation of a particular place-based policy aimed at addressing wealth inequality, that is, land reform. It focuses on Basilicata in the Italian south, where massive land invasions took place between December 1949 and March 1950 in reaction to long-lasting and extreme inequality. The invading peasants were solicited and even coordinated by local Communist Party leade…
Plague and long-term development
This article aims to analyse the effects of plague on the long-term development of Italian cities, with particular attention to the 1629-30 epidemic. By using a new dataset on plague mortality rates in 56 cities covering the period c. 1575-1700, an economic geography model verifying the existence of multiple equilibria is estimated. It is found that cities severely affected by the 1629-30 plague were displaced to a lower growth path. It is also f…
Resilience to health shocks and the spatial extent of local labour markets
In addition to the general issue that fewer interpersonal contacts reduce the speed of contagion, less attention has been paid to the spatial configuration of such contacts. In Italy, Covid-19 severely affected the most industrialized area of the country, where the network of commuting flows is particularly dense. We investigate the relationship between workers’ mobility and the diffusion of the disease by computing, for each municipality, the in…
Drought and aridity influence internal migration worldwide
The long-term economic effects of aridification
The Political Consequences of Green Policies
For many governments, enacting green policies is a priority, but such policies often impose on citizens substantial and uneven costs. How does the introduction of green policies affect voting? We study this question in the context of a major ban on polluting cars introduced in Milan, which was strongly opposed by the populist right party Lega. Using several inferential strategies, we show that owners of banned vehicles-who incurred a median loss …
Desertification, crop yield and economic development
This study uses a global grid-level dataset, integrating gross domestic product (GDP) per capita with crop yield and climate variables to examine the economic impact of climate-induced desertification. We use the aridity index (AI) to measure desertification and find that annual variations of soil aridity have a more significant economic impact than precipitation and temperature when taken alone, with Africa experiencing the most significant effe…
Soil aridification, precipitation, and infant health
While research has studied the effects of climate variation on child nutrition, the role of soil moisture and degradation in shaping child well-being remains relatively understudied. Combining climate and infant health data from Africa, we show that rainfall’s health benefits are mediated by potential evapotranspiration (PET), highlighting the importance of soil-retained moisture. Infants born in areas of greater PET face higher risks of being un…
Economics (19 works) · Geography (16 works) · Economic geography (11 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Demographic economics (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Regional Economics and Spatial Analysis (7 works) · Business (5 works) · Development economics (5 works) · Regional Development and Policy (5 works)