Baffi Centre publishes Baffi Master Theses Working Paper Series
Baffi Centre has published the Baffi Master Theses Working Paper Series. The collection of papers aims to recognize and disseminate outstanding master’s theses that have achieved the highest academic distinction. This initiative provides a platform for high-quality research conducted by graduate students.
The Baffi Master Theses Working Paper Series, available in the Publications section of Baffi Centre website, include 5 working papers:
- Advaita Singh (2025). “Dealers of Direct Democracy Strategic Initiation, Popularity and Agenda-Setting in Top-Down Referendums”;
- Giovanni Biasiucci (2025). “Dilemma not Trilemma? The Global Financial Cycle and Japan (1997–2023)”;
- Filippo Durero (2025). “The Effectiveness of European Monetary Policy amid Global Supply Chain Pressures”
- Sveva Manfredi (2024). “Female Strategic Substantive Representation: Evidence from two Italian Radical Right Leaders”;
- Marvin Pappalettera (2024). “Mapping Voters’ Preferences with Digital Trace Data and Random Utility Models”
The topics of Baffi Master Theses Working Paper
Direct democracy has experienced a revival over the past century, primarily through topdown referendums initiated by political elites. Singh’s paper presents a framework to analyze the intersection of direct democratic instruments and representative politics, focusing on the strategic incentives that drive politicians to employ referendums for political gain. Using a three-stage sequential game, the study underscores the importance of agenda-setting power and political popularity in shaping this trend. In doing so, it accounts for global variation in the use of referendums—ranging from their deployment by autocrats and populists to fringe actors and re-election-seeking executives.
Financial integration through cross-border capital flows has limited the ability of individual economies to insulate themselves from global shocks, as the growing synchronicity of international capital movements defines the Global Financial Cycle. However, the cycle can be more amplified for certain economies. Japan offers a compelling case: it is one of the three reservecurrency issuers, the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, and a central location for global carry trades. Biasucci’s study uses a regime-dependent framework that conditions the transmission of the cycle through U.S. monetary policy shocks on two global-risk regimes to assess their impact on credit in Japan across banks and non-bank intermediaries, using disaggregated credit data by type and lender from 1997 to 2023. The evidence proves the mirroring effect: changes in Japanese liquidity mirror global liquidity conditions. We find three main results. First, exposure to external shocks is asymmetric, as non-bank financial intermediaries exhibit greater sensitivity and act as amplification channels. Second, U.S. monetary tightenings contract domestic credit, particularly in a low-risk global regime. Third, after 2009 credit from foreign banks has become more procyclical with the cycle. The study suggests that monitoring financial institutions by their sensitivity to global conditions can provide guidance for macroprudential policy, reflecting that the Mundell–Fleming trilemma has evolved into a dilemma.
Durero’s study employs nonlinear adaptations of local projection methods to explore how global supply chain conditions influence the transmission of monetary policy in the Euro Area and its four largest economies: Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Finally, it leverages Denmarks unique monetary framework to exploit an exogenous source of variation, grounded in the trilemma of international finance, to strengthen the analysis of inflation dynamics. The findings reveal that heightened supply chain pressures do not consistently amplify the standard effects of monetary policy shocks on macroeconomic outcomes. While industrial production and inflation show a mildly increased sensitivity to monetary interventions under supply chain stress, no systematic state-dependent patterns emerge for retail trade and unemployment. To interpret these results, I empirically assess how the cost of external financing reacts to monetary policy across different supply chain conditions, testing the theory that an intensified credit channel underlies the observed amplification. Overall, the credit channels role appears secondary in the Euro Area. Two key insights emerge from a monetary policy perspective. First, advanced economies with credible monetary frameworks better anchor inflation expectations and stabilize inflation amid global supply chain disruptions, whereas emerging and low-income economies- characterized by weaker monetary frameworks- face greater challenges, increasing the risk of inflation expectations becoming de-anchored and diminishing monetary policy effectiveness. Second, the ambiguous effects on real economic variables limit the ability to quantify the economic costs of inflation stabilization under global supply chain disruptions. Further research in this direction would be highly valuable.
Manfredi’s paper investigates the impact of the engendering of Radical Right Parties (RRP) in Europe on female Substantive Representation, intended as the increasing discussion of female issues by female politicians. The paper contributes to the literature on political representation and political communication, using a large dataset and building a novel dictionary in Italian for topic classification with Python to fill the gap in prior research. Using Facebook captions from leaders of two Italian Radical Right parties, Manfredi’s study challenges the assumption that more female politicians lead to more discussions on female issues. Surprisingly, no significant difference was found in the likelihood of Meloni discussing female issues compared to Salvini. However, during Salvini’s time in office, Meloni’s likelihood of posting about female issues increased, suggesting strategic behaviour in response to political competition. Manfredi’s research introduces the new concept of Strategic Substantive Representation, highlighting how female RRP politicians may strategically engage with these topics.
Pappalettera’s research presents a novel methodological framework for applying the spatial theory of voting to digital trace data obtained from social media platforms. Traditional data collection methods often have limitations in capturing individuals’ ideologies and political preferences, which are essential for the empirical application of this theory. On the other hand, recent advancements in online network ideological scaling techniques have allowed researchers to estimate the ideological positions of large samples of individuals based on their online activities. Nevertheless, there is still a significant gap in the literature when it comes to applying the spatial theory of voting to these data. This study aims to fill this gap by utilizing a novel dataset containing the ideological positions of hundreds of thousands of Twitter users. The study proposes a simultaneous model of party choice and abstention, wherein voters are positioned in a multi-dimensional ideological space and vote probabilistically as a function of their relative distance from the parties. The major contribution of his paper is an innovative estimation approach based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation. By treating the use of aggregate data as a measurement error problem, I demonstrate how to estimate this model without relying on individual-level choice data, making this framework ideal for working with digital traces. The analysis is divided into two parts. Firstly, the model is tested on the results of the 2022 national election in Italy. The results indicate that voters possess meaningful ideologies, and economic issues constitute the most relevant ideological dimension in explaining the election results. Secondly, by applying the spatial theory of voting in the framework of a “multi-class classification problem with aggregate data”, Pappalettera’s study demonstrates how to predict individual-level voting behavior accurately.