Resisting the extortion racket: an empirical analysis

While the contributions on the organized crime and Mafia environments are many, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the firm’s decision to resist to extortion. Our case study is based on Addiopizzo, an NGO that, from 2004, invites firms to refuse requests from the local Mafia and to join a public list of “non-payers”. The research is based on a dataset obtained linking the current administrative archives maintained by the chambers of commerce and the list updated by the NGO. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, to gather sound data on the characteristics of the Addiopizzo joiners; second to model the probability to join Addiopizzo by a two-level logistic regression model. We …