Articles in refereed journals


Other publications


Working papers

Fallucchi E., D. Fares and E. Manzoni (2026), What Drives Inaction on Climate Change? A Review of the Literature,  Working Paper n. 35, University of Bergamo, DSE.


Despite widespread concern about climate change, behavioral engagement and policy support remain limited. We present and reinterpret existing evidence through a collective-action framework informed by belief-dependent preferences. Two belief channels—first-order beliefs about others’ behavior (descriptive norms) and second-order beliefs about others’ expectations (social expectations)—are embedded in a behavioral public-goods model. When beliefs are accurate, these channels sustain conditional cooperation and self-fulfilling collective action. Inaction may instead arise when the belief references are biaseddownward. We distinguish between two empirically grounded sources of distortion: genuine misperceptions, arising from informational limits and bounded rationality, and motivated misperceptions, driven by self-serving and identity-protective reasoning. This distinction guides policy: visibility and feedback correct genuine errors; identity-compatible framing, in-group messages, and narrative persuasion counter motivated bias. We thus connect the behavioral theory of conditional cooperation with empirical evidence on belief distortions and map the different mechanisms to interventions that overcome collectiveclimate inaction.

Manzoni E., E. Murard, S. Quercia and S. Tonini (2024), News, emotions, and policy views on Immigration, IZA DP No. 17017. conditionally accepted at the Journal of the European Economic Association


How do emotions affect policy views on immigration? How do they influence the way people process and respond to factual information? We address these questions using a survey experiment in Italy, which randomly exposes around 7,000 participants to (i) sensational news about immigrant crimes, (ii) statistical information about immigration, or to (iii) the combination of both. First, we find different effects of news depending on the severity of the reported crime: while the news of a rape against a young woman significantly increases the demand for anti-immigration policies, the news of a petty theft has no impact. Consistent with a causal role of emotions, we find that the rape news triggers a stronger emotional reaction than the theft news, while having a similar effect on factual beliefs. Second, we document that information provision corrects beliefs, irrespective of whether participants are also exposed to the rape news. Yet, the exposure to the rape news strongly influences whether belief updating translates into a change in policy views: when presented in isolation, information tends to reduce anti-immigration views; when combined with the rape news, the impact of the latter dominates and participants increase their anti-immigration views to the same extent as when exposed to the rape news only. This evidence suggests that, once negative emotions are triggered, having more accurate factual knowledge no longer matters for forming policy views on immigration. 

Cella M., E. Manzoni and F. Scervini (2024), Issue salience and women's performance. Theory and evidence from Google Trends, CESifo Working paper n. 10922. 


In this paper we study whether and how the belief that the gender of politicians affects their competence on different issues influences electoral outcomes depending on the salience of those issues. We first propose a theoretical model of issue-specific gender bias in elections which can describe both the presence of a real comparative advantage (‘kernel-of-truth’ case, or stereotype) and the case of pure prejudice. We show that, if the bias exists, it influences electoral results and that its effect can be partially reversed by successful information transmission during the electoral campaign. We then empirically investigate the relation between issue salience and women’s performance using US data on House and Senate elections. Estimates of issue salience are obtained using Google Trends data. Exploiting the longitudinal dimension of the dataset at district level and an IV strategy to rule out possible endogeneity, we show a positive correlation between the salience of those issues that are typically listed as feminine and women’s electoral outcomes. We therefore conclude that a bias indeed exists. The average effect of the bias is sizable with respect to the share of votes for women candidates, even if not large enough to significantly increase the probability that women candidates win elections.

Attanasi G.,  M. Chessa, S. Gil-Gallen, and E. Manzoni (2022), Bargaining with confirmed proposals: an experimental analysis of tacit cooperation on duopoly games, Working paper n. 13, University of Bergamo, DSE. 


We investigate the performance of a bargaining over strategies protocol with confirmed proposals applied to duopoly markets modeled after Bertrand \textit{vs.} Cournot competition, while neutralizing the price- vs. quantity-setting framing. The bargaining protocol was implemented with either symmetric (i.e., alternating between the two players) or asymmetric (i.e., assigned solely to one player) confirmation power for agreeing on the strategies to be played in the duopoly market.We characterize the set of subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes of the bargaining game with confirmed proposals for each of the four combinations of market game and confirmation power. Based on these characterizations, we formulate experimental hypotheses, disentangling the four features of collusive agreements: equity, welfare-maximization, Pareto-efficiency, equilibrium outcomes. Our experimental results broadly validate previous findings of more cooperative behavior in Bertrand than in Cournot duopolies. Alternating confirmation power only increases the speed of cooperation. The key factor in the bargaining protocol is the confirmation option, rather than the equal assignment of this option.

Work in progress

This paper examines how religious ethic influences contributions to public goods. We develop a theoretical model distinguishing individualistic motivations---where people seek to meet individual moral standards---from collectivistic motivations---where behavior is guided by others' expectations. We argue that the Protestant ethic emphasizes individual responsibility, while the Catholic ethic places greater weight on social expectations. The model predicts that the Protestant contribution share increases with income, whereas the Catholic contribution share is non-monotonic. Moreover, Catholics' overall contribution is relatively higher at lower-middle incomes and lower at higher-middle incomes, while there is no denominational difference in the decision whether to contribute at all. The model also implies that only Catholics' contributions are sensitive to the religious composition of their environment. We test these predictions using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, exploiting variation within individuals. Consistent with the theoretical model, we find $(i)$ no denominational differences at the extensive margin; $(ii)$ at the intensive margin, donations increase with income among Protestants and remain flat among Catholics. These results hold when using the denomination of the parents, suggesting intergenerational transmission of religious ethics. Our findings highlight the role of religious moral structures in shaping cooperative behavior and public-good provision.
We develop a theory of housing price spillovers based on price references, whereby learning about unobservable location attributes gives rise to spatial contagion of house prices. Our model justifies the use of Spatial Autoregressive models (SAR) with row-normalized weight matrices based on geographical proximity and predicts that the strengths of housing price spillovers are driven by expected price changes during both booms and busts. Hence, we explain the evolution of spillover strength across market cycles. This testable implication is supported by data from the US over recent periods of housing market boom and bust, of 2018-2023 and 2007-2012, respectively.

Old working papers

Manzoni E. (2020), Extreme events, ex post renegotiation and vagueness of campaign promises, Working Paper n. 10/2020, University of Verona, DSE.              Online Appendix

The paper considers the effect of extreme ex-post realizations of the state of the world on implemented policies. I model a unilateral renegotiation process through which the elected politician may deviate from his set of promised policies, as long as the majority of voters are as well off. I show that the possibility of renegotiation decreases ex-ante discretion of the candidates and increases their ex-post one. Moreover, in the presence of convex costs of renegotiation, extremist candidates are more constrained ex-ante, but may implement extremist policies ex post.

Iannantuoni G., E. Manzoni and F. Rossi (2019), Hidden Networks within the European Parliament: a Spatial Econometrics Approach, Working Paper n. 14/2019, University of Verona, DSE.  Supplementary material

The European political spectrum can be modelled as a two-dimensional space, whose interpretation has been investigated in the spatial voting literature by regression analysis. However, data on legislators’ positions display spatial clustering that is not explained by the standard models. We account for correlation among legislators by modelling spatial dependence across countries, using a new sets of geopolitical and cultural metrics. We confirm the well known result that the first dimension of the European political space is mainly explained by the Members of European Parliament’s ideological position on a left-right scale, although correlation across legislators cannot be neglected. We show that spatial correlation plays instead a central role when interpreting the more controversial second dimension of the political spectrum. The most relevant proximity measures are based on geographical proximity, institutional similarities and on three cultural metrics related to which issues play a central role in the political debate. 

Gilli M. and E. Manzoni (2019), Populism, the Backlash Against Ruling Politicians and the Possible Malfunctioning of Representative Democracy, Working paper n. 417, University of Milano-Bicocca, DEMS.


The aim of this paper is to investigate the links between lack of trust in ruling politicians and the functioning of a representative democracy. Within a standard principal-agent model of democracy, we show how lack of trust by citizens as reflected by passive beliefs updating may lead to the malfunctioning of representative democracy. We highlight how de facto accountability crucially depends on out-of-equilibrium beliefs, and that this is indeed descriptive of a substantive feature of public opinion that affects the functioning of democracy. Specifically, we show that effective accountability needs more than simple retrospective voting, as it requires voters to believe in the existence of good politicians that always choose according to voters' interests, so that a deviation from bad policies can happen only because the leader is congruent. In this case, the unique equilibrium is an efficient one that maximizes voters' welfare. However, if, on the other hand, the citizens share an overall lack of trust in ruling elites, then there is another inefficient equilibrium, where even the congruent politician behaves badly because of the adverse but rational voters' behavior. This inefficient equilibrium does not depend on fake news or on distorted beliefs or, again, on voters' heterogenous preferences, since the voters' perfectly observe the quality of the policy implemented by the government, are fully rational and share the same interests. This result might contribute to explain the increasing negative perceptions on the working of democracy as due to a self-fulfilling equilibrium.