Access to useful knowledge is crucial for fostering modern economic growth. We show, for the first time, that knowledge accumulated and stored in monasteries was useful for innovation. In 1866, anticlerical legislation in Italy led to the suppression of religious orders, the expropriation of...

We provide new results on the misreported level of mortality in the Italian region of Lombardy and in the province of Bergamo using official and original data sources. Since February 2020 Lombardy and in particular the province of Bergamo have been severely hit by the novel COVID-19 infectious...

We examine the empirical relationship between the exposure to earthquake hazard and civic capital in Italian municipalities. Drawing on the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, we find that earthquake hazard increases civic capital. We decompose the effect of earthquake...

Do religiously driven cultural norms contribute to the gender gap? Focusing on Italian municipalities in the Piedmont region, we study the long-run cultural effect of medieval Waldensian Christian communities on early 19th century female literacy rates. All outcomes of the education gender gap...

We conduct a hybrid experimental-observational study on college students to investigate whether the exposure to institutions of significantly heterogeneous quality affects their behavior and their stereotypes about others' behavior in a corruption experiment. The 2x2 between-subject experimental...

Do religiously driven cultural norms contribute to the gender gap? Focusing on Italian municipalities in the Piedmont region, we study the long-run cultural effect of medieval Waldensian Christian communities on early 19th century female literacy rates. All outcomes of the education gender gap...