Why is there significant political support for progressive taxation and equalizing government transfers in western democracies? Possibilities include individual socail preferences for a less unequal distribution than what market forces alone would dictate, demand for social insurance, or...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how demand for redistribution of income depends on self-interest, insurance motives, and social concerns relating to inequality and efficiency. Our choice environments feature large groups of subjects and real world framing, and differ with respect to...

We investigate the political impact of entertainment television in Italy over the past thirty years by exploiting the staggered introduction of Silvio Berlusconi's commercial TV network, Mediaset, in the early 1980s. We find that individuals in municipalities that had access to Mediaset prior to...

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal...

Can providing information to potential migrants influence their decisions about risky and irregular migration? We conduct an experiment with over 7,000 secondary school students in Guinea, providing information through video testimonials by migrants who settled in Europe and through aggregate...

We investigate the historical origins of female genital cutting (FGC), a harmful practice widespread across Africa. We test the hypothesis - substantiated by historical sources - that FGC was connected to the Red Sea slave trade route, where women were sold as concubines in the Middle East and...

This paper focuses on fertility choices in Brazil, a country where soap operas (novelas) portray families that are much smaller than in reality, to study the effects of television on individual behavior. Using Census data for the period 1970-1991, the paper finds that women living in areas...

This paper studies the link between television and divorce in Brazil by exploiting variation in the timing of availability of the signal of Rede Globo - the network that had a virtual monopoly on telenovelas in the country - across municipal areas. Using three rounds of Census data (1970, 1980...