Abstract
It has long been recognized that the presence of politicians on the boards of directors of public firms may create inefficiencies. Nevertheless, research has so far neglected the effect of political affiliation on the appointment of Members of Parliament to the boards of public firms. This article intends to fill this gap by conducting an empirical analysis on a sample of 945 deputies of the Italian Parliament elected over the period 1996–2001. Regression discontinuity estimates show that the centre-left coalition is about 25 percentage points more likely to appoint its Members of Parliament to the board of public enterprises than the centre-right coalition. Political appointments become more pronounced when the centre-left forms a governing coalition.
Acknowledgment
We are grateful to the Managing Editor, George Wamser, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. A special thank goes to Matteo Picchio for his insightful comments. We also would like to thank participants at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Economic Journal in Lisbon, Portugal and those of the 30th Annual Conference of the Italian Society of Public Economics. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Code and Datasets
The author(s) published code and data associated with this article in the ZBW Journal Data Archive, a storage platform for datasets. See: http://doi.org/10.15456/ger.2019302.170040.
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