We present a theory linking political and social trust to explain trust erosion in modern societies. Individuals disagree on the seriousness of an externality problem, which leads to diverging policy opinions on how to solve it. This heterogeneity has two important effects on trust. First,...

We explore cheating behaviours in a die roll task in response to information about tax malpractice in Italy using a survey experiment on a representative sample of the Italian population. We thus generalise laboratory findings on conditional behaviours (cooperation, cheating) to uncover their...

Inequality not only generates status differentials between rich and poor individuals, it also generates status differentials between groups of different composition and income level. We organise the social structure within which groups are embedded to directly manipulate the processes of...

Beliefs about others' cooperativeness are among the strongest determinants of cooperative behaviours. Beliefs about different others, however, are not necessarily uniform, nor necessarily related to past behaviours: different expectations about different others might solely originate from...

Can prior voluntary redistribution improve coordination? We theoretically show that distributive preferences, forward induction and signalling all imply that it can. We then experimentally test our predictions by allowing subjects to redistribute part of their endowment before playing a battle...

Organized crime uses political violence to influence politics in a wide set of countries. This paper exploits a novel dataset of attacks directed towards Italian local politicians to study how (and why) criminal organizations use violence against them. We test two competing theories to predict...

Families often play a significant role in representative democracies. In this paper, we test the extent to which dynastic and non-dynastic leaders differ in their policy making. Our empirical analysis focuses on local politics in Italy, using a large sample of mayors and mayoral candidates in...