Empirical studies have shown that preferences for redistribution are significantly correlated with expectations of future mobility and the belief that society offers equal opportunities. We add to previous research by investigating the role of individual and social norms on rent seeking. We find...

There is a surprising gap in the economic literature on social capital. First, we lack studies addressing the effects of social capital on those facets of development that can contribute in making growth more sustainable in the long run, like, for example, human development and social cohesion....

Correspondence audits are a popular method to examine discrimination in a causal framework. However, they often require sending hundreds or thousands of emails to subjects. The sendemails package allows users to automatically send emails with Stata through PowerShell, which is open-source and...

We study how the political cost of enforcing a lockdown in response to the COVID- 19 outbreak relates to citizens' propensity for altruistic punishment in Italy, the early epicenter of the pandemic. Approval for the government's management of the crisis decreases with the amount of the penalties...

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the causal nexus connecting social capital's diverse aspects to the "quality" of economic development in Italy. The analysis accounts for three main social capital dimensions (i.e., bonding, bridging and linking social capital) and measures them...