Filippo Pavesi

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that participation in cultural associations improves social capital, and more specifically generalized trust, which in turn fosters environmental concern. Using a dataset combining two large cross-national socioeconomic surveys and an instrumental variable mediation approach, we find that a measure of generalized trust fully mediates the relationship between people’s participation in cultural organizations and their environmental concerns. This result suggests that governments can increase citizens' environmental concern, a prerequisite for pro-environmental behaviors, by encouraging their participation in cultural associations.

By promoting economic growth, human capital may contribute to the rise in CO2 emissions, but it may also stimulate emission-reducing technologies. Starting from a Green Solow model augmented with human capital, we show that the former effect dominates the latter when human capital is below a critical value, while the opposite is true when human capital becomes sufficiently high. We also find that this result may delay the observability of an EKC and that human capital is more important than savings and depreciation rates in predicting CO2 growth. This evidence has relevant policy implications regarding which factors should be considered to mitigate carbon emissions.

We explore the impact of narratives on beliefs and policy opinions through a survey experiment that exposes US subjects to two media-based explanations of the causes of COVID-19. The Lab Narrative ascribes the pandemic to human error and scientific misconduct in a Chinese lab, and the Nature Narrative describes the natural causes of the virus. First, we find that both narratives influence individual beliefs about COVID-19 origins. More precisely, individual beliefs tend to be swayed in the direction of the version of the facts to which one is more exposed generating a potential source of polarization by exposure. Second, only the Nature Narrative unidirectionally affects policy opinions by increasing people’s preferences toward climate protection and trust in science, therefore representing a channel for one-sided polarization by exposure. Finally, we also explore the existence of heterogeneous effects of our narratives, finding that the Lab Narrative leads to opinion polarization between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states on climate change and foreign trade. This indicates the existence of an additional channel that can lead policy opinions to diverge, which we denote polarization by social context.

We investigate how the opportunity cost of delegation influences the impact of communication on trust, trustworthiness and communication style. To do this, we adopt a modified trust game in which the trustee may send a message to the trustor, before the latter chooses whether to delegate decision rights to the former. Our analysis shows that, only when the opportunity cost of delegation is high does communication have a positive effect on the beliefs (first and second order) relative to the amount the trustor will receive if he chooses to delegate, as well on the trustee's beliefs on the probability of delegation occurring. This implies that the incentives to use communication to increase trust are greater when the opportunity cost of delegation is higher, even if it does not affect the decision to delegate and is associated with deception. Regarding communication style, our analysis shows that non-precise promises are used more frequently when the opportunity cost of delegation is low, and the trustor has less to lose from delegating. We also document an “illusion effect” whereby trustees erroneously expect non-precise promises to have an impact on the beliefs of trustors.

We present evidence that international trade may exacerbate the initial unequal distribution of hydric resources. This result is driven by the fact that countries exporting agricultural goods are relatively abundant (with respect to capital) in the combined availability of water and arable land but, in absolute terms, scarce in capital and not richer in water in comparison to more developed ones. Due to both the scarcity of capital and the lower relative price of natural resources with respect to capital, the total value of production in these developing countries is modest, implying that international trade can lead to a less even distribution of the water content of consumption. Policies sustaining water prices and, more generally, those of natural resources (or lower capital costs) may contribute to offsetting this effect and allow for trade to play a positive role in reducing the uneven distribution of water endowments.

Decision makers often face uncertainty about the ability and the integrity of their advisors. If an expert is sufficiently concerned about establishing a reputation for being skilled and unbiased, she may truthfully report her private information about the decision-relevant state. However, while in a truthtelling equilibrium the decision maker learns only about the ability of the expert, in an equilibrium with some misreporting she also learns about the expert's bias. Although truthtelling allows for better current decisions, it may lead to worse sorting outcomes. This occurs if misreporting is principally caused by biased experts driven by their conflict of interest rather than by unbiased experts attempting to signal their type. Whenever lying has these features, it increases the decision maker's expected utility with respect to truthtelling if she is sufficiently concerned about future choices. In these cases, it is optimal to adopt policies aimed at reducing advisors' career concerns and we suggest real world examples in which these could be implemented.

Social scientists have devoted considerable research effort to investigate the determinants of the Partisan Gender Gap (PGG), whereby US women (men) tend to exhibit more liberal (conservative) political preferences over time. Results of a survey experiment run during the COVID-19 emergency and involving 3,086 US residents show that exposing subjects to alternative narratives on the causes of the pandemic increases the PGG: relative to a baseline treatment in which no narrative manipulation is implemented, exposing subjects to either the Lab narrative (claiming that COVID-19 was caused by a lab accident in Wuhan) or the Nature narrative (according to which COVID-19 originated in the wildlife) makes women more liberal. The polarization effect documented in our experiment is magnified by the political orientation of participants' state of residence: the largest PGG effect is between men residing in Republican-leaning states and women living in Democratic-leaning states.

COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe at an exponential speed, infecting millions and overwhelming even the most prepared healthcare systems. Concerns are looming that the healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are mostly unprepared to combat the virus because of limited resources. The problems in LMICs are exacerbated by the fact that citizens in these countries generally exhibit low trust in the healthcare system because of its low quality, which could trigger a number of uncooperative behaviors. In this paper, we focus on one such behavior and investigate the relationship between trust in the healthcare system and the probability of potential treatment-seeking behavior upon the appearance of the first symptoms of COVID-19. First, we provide motivating evidence from a unique national online survey administered in Armenia–a post-Soviet LMIC country. We then present results from a large-scale survey experiment in Armenia that provides causal evidence supporting the investigated relationship. Our main finding is that a more trustworthy healthcare system enhances the probability of potential treatment-seeking behavior when observing the initial symptoms.

Whistleblowing is a powerful tool that the tax authorities of various countries use to curb tax evasion. Nonetheless, the determinants shaping one's positive attitude toward whistleblowing are rather understudied. We investigate the relationship between trust in the government and the attitude toward whistleblowing on tax evaders. Potential whistleblowers may distrust the government either because they doubt that it will operate efficiently (avoiding to waste tax revenue) and fairly (treating all taxpayers equally), or because they fear that their anonymity may not be preserved. We focus on the relationship between the former channel of distrust and the attitude toward whistleblowing, and our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we provide motivating evidence from a unique national household survey administered in the Republic of Armenia. We then present results from a large-scale survey experiment in the USA that provides causal evidence in support of the investigated relationship. Our main finding is that a more trustworthy government exerts a positive effect on citizens’ attitude toward whistleblowing.

The food industry is facing a large number of challenges and a new paradigm for the development, acquisition and implementation of the huge potential of scientific breakthroughs is needed. Traditionally, the food NPD process is a closed process, where the inputs for new ideas come mainly from internal sources and new products are developed within the company’s boundaries. Recently, this process has been modified to accommodate the OI paradigm, that addresses these challenges and opportunities, but it is still gaining momentum in the food sector. The main objective of this exploratory study is to investigate which stages of the NPD process food companies use to open, as well as which types of collaborations are established during each (open) stage of the NPD process. Three food companies were analysed and results suggest that the NPD process is more open during the very first phases, during the so-called fuzzy front-end. As for the collaboration, in the first stages of the NPD process the role played by customers and consumers is highly relevant, conversely suppliers’ centrality becomes higher when technical knowledge is required.