Research
Research
"Intergenerational Coresidence and the Covid-19 Pandemic in the United States" with Luca Pensieroso and Alessandro Sommacal
Economics and Human Biology, Volume 49, April 2023, 101230
This paper investigates the relation between intergenerational coresidence and mortality from Covid-19 in 2020. Using a cross-section of U.S. counties, we show that this association is positive, sizeable, significant, and robust to the inclusion of several demographic and socio-economic controls. Furthermore, using evidence from past, pre-pandemic years, we argue that this positive, sizeable and significant association is somewhat specific to the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Fertility and Family Type in the United States: a Historical Analysis" with Luca Pensieroso and Alessandro Sommacal [LINK]
We provide a historical decomposition of fertility in the United States by family type. We document a new fact of the American fertility transition: intergenerational coresidence was systematically associated with lower fertility compared to nuclear families, with the difference shrinking over time. This pattern is robust to controlling for several demographic and socioeconomic confounders. To rationalise these findings, we build a novel model with endogenous fertility and intergenerational coresidence. In the model, a positive differential fertility in favour of the nuclear family emerges when the amount of resources allocated to the young under coresidence is lower than the amount they would enjoy in a nuclear family. We show how this income effect hinges on the interplay between the relative income of the young and their preferences for intergenerational coresidence. Simulations from a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium version of the model show that the model has the right qualitative behaviour, and is quantitatively meaningful.
"Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior: Evidence from the American Frontier"
Today, social capital and individualism are strikingly positively correlated. But can social capital arise in individualistic-prone environments? I study this question in the context of the American frontier expansion. Historical accounts document that the hardship of the settlement created concomitantly high returns for cooperation and self-reliance. Exploiting weather variability as plausibly exogenous variation for cooperative behavior, I show that weather variability reduces the return to individualism in frontier counties. Among frontier counties with higher weather variability, I find larger religious communities, an early proxy of social capital (Putnam (2020)). By linking the coexistence of individualism and social capital to the American frontier experience, this paper provides the first quantitative evidence on De Tocqueville’s doctrine of self interest, rightly understood, where pursuing the self interest coincided with doing the common good.
"The Historical Origins of Social Capital Evidence from the Age of Mass Migration in the United States" data collection in progress
"Unveiling the Tapestry: Mental Health Among Sexual Minorities in More Conservative Brazilian States"
with Florencia Amabile and Lorena Hakak
"The Effects of Federal Housing Authority (FHA)’s Lending and Insuring Practices during the New Deal"
with Luca Bagnato (U. of Bologna), Paola Giuliano (UCLA) and Nico Voigtlaender (UCLA)
"Emergency Education and Innovation: Evidence from World War II" with Michela Giorcelli (UCLA)