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.

Decision-making crucially relies on information. There are many cases in which those in charge of making decisions face a relative scarcity of relevant information with respect to other agents who instead possess it (i.e., experts). With information being available but asymmetrically distributed, a problem arises about how effectively it can be transmitted and used. In particular, when an expert is known (or simply believed) to face conflicts of interest and the decision maker cannot use contracts to align incentives, a problem of credibility arises with respect to the information conveyed by the expert. This chapter offers a selected review of the theoretical literature on strategic information transmission which studies the issue of how much information can be credibly conveyed by an informed but biased agent in the absence of explicit incentives. Given the vast size of this literature, the contribution of this review is to identify four broad institutional aspects that are deemed to be key: (i) the extent to which delegation can be superior to communication; (ii) the role that experts’ competition plays in helping the decision maker elicit information; (iii) the effectiveness of reputation as an implicit incentive that can align incentives; (iv) the role played by networks. We outline the role of these key institutional aspects in influencing information revelation with the scope of providing a platform for the design of expert markets and institutions.

Il cibo è una necessità assoluta per il sostentamento fisico della vita umana, ma è anche un’espressione culturale irrinunciabile per ciascuno individuo. Il testo si addentra in un campo difficoltoso e complesso quello del cibo e della cucina, che richiede una spiccata sensibilità, permeata di radicati e irrinunciabili principi etici. Per farlo si avvale, oltreché della competenza degli autori, anche delle esperienze e tecniche professionali maturate in anni di appassionato lavoro e approfondite ricerche sul campo di numerosi esperti e studiosi. L’opera prende le mosse da alcune notazioni sulla "Filosofia del cibo", argomento già affrontato dagli Autori nel testo «Metafisica, Filosofia e Scienza del Cibo» pubblicato nel 2022 dalla nostra casa editrice, grazie al contributo di Grazia Bottiglieri. Vengono quindi forniti alcuni pochi storiografici sul cibo, in modo da renderli immediati ed agevoli per richiamarci alla mente l’articolata problematica del cibo in tavola, senza debordare in ipotesi, magari molto suggestive, ma prive di quel filo logico che rende l’esposizione di questo delicato argomento solida e certa, quale si è mantenuta da oltre 3.500 anni. La prima parte del testo è dedicata alle diete alimentari e le loro caratterizzazioni, introducendo alcune considerazioni propedeutiche e articolate sulla specie umana, spingendosi poi sulla suddivisione e classificazione delle scienze alimentari, sulle relazioni tra l’organismo umano e il suo ambiente e sul carattere delle popolazioni che vi risiedono. L’introduzione affronta poi la relazione fra uomo e cibo, inteso come questione tecnica, mediatica e morale, senza tralasciare osservazioni sul binomio cibo – medicina. Segue un articolato capitolo dedicato all’arte cibaria, che parte dalla visione del cibo come medicina naturale per passare ad analizzarne gli aspetti culturali ed artistici e persino spirituali. Si analizza poi la catena alimentare umana nella società contemporanea e si definiscono gli elementi nutrizionali, per passare all’’evoluzione della cucina nel tempo, dalle tecniche fermentative ai metodi e sistemi di cottura dei cibi, fino a considerare le diete contemporanee, anche in relazione al cancro. La seconda parte si sofferma sull’universalizzazione della cucina e lo specialissimo "caso italiano", percorrendone i tratti salienti – compresi valori simbolici e valori mitici – , fornendo precisazioni di carattere generale e tecnologico sugli alimenti maggiormente diffusi nel nostro paese e alcuni cenni storici sul pane italiano, passando poi a pasta, riso, carne e pesce. Chiude il testo una postfazione che propone qualche consiglio su come condurre una "vita cibaria igienica" per mantenerci sani il più a lungo possibile.

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.

L’alimentazione soddisfa un bisogno di sopravvivenza da parte dell’uomo, ma ha anche una rilevanza culturale, simbolica e sociale. La nascita dell’agricoltura infatti risale a oltre 20000 anni fa, e coincide con uno degli avvenimenti più importanti della storia dell’essere umano: l’abbandono alle pratiche di nomadismo e la conseguente nascita delle prime forme di civiltà e di aggregazione sociale, nonché la nascita dell’economia e di organizzazioni politicamente centralizzate. Questo capitolo comincia tracciando l’evoluzione socio-economica dell’industria alimentare dalla nascita dei sistemi alimentari. Ripercorrendo le tappe che hanno segnato la storia della relazione uomo-cibo, spiegheremo come questa abbia comportato sostanziali differenze nello sviluppo delle società mondiali. Per analizzare tale tematica non ci si può esimere dall’indagare le cause esogene che hanno condotto alla nascita dei sistemi alimentari, nonché di come l’uomo sia approdato all’agricoltura attraverso l’addomesticazione dell’ambiente circostante. Con peculiare attenzione nei confronti delle conseguenze di tale processo, e di come questo sia stato determinate per la costituzione di società complesse, e per la nascita dell’economia e del commercio. Nella seconda parte del capitolo ci soffermeremo inoltre, sull’analisi della domanda alimentare, con riferimento alle nuove tendenze del consumatore moderno, e come in risposta a tali cambiamenti anche l’offerta alimentare sia mutata. La terza parte del capitolo, dopo aver esaminato il progressivo aumento della produzione alimentare in risposta all’aumento della popolazione mondiale, si soffermerà sui paradossi dell’attuale sistema alimentare e sulla profonda disparità tra i paesi meno sviluppati, privi delle risorse alimentari sufficienti e limitati nella possibilità di accesso al cibo, ed i paesi sviluppati. In questi ultimi, le crescenti esigenze di cibo hanno spinto ad una fortissima crescita dell’industria alimentare, con un significativo impatto ambientale in tutte le fasi della lavorazione degli alimenti, dalla coltivazione all’allevamento fino alla distribuzione dei prodotti finiti.