Abstract

We study the long-term effects of early-life exposure to low-dose radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster on adult health and fertility outcomes. Exploiting exogenous variation in radioactive fallout across Italian municipalities, we construct a radiation exposure index and link it to administrative data on hospitalizations (2004–2016) and delivery certificates (2002–2019) for 18 birth cohorts (1976–1993). Women exposed in utero or during early childhood exhibit elevated rates of thyroid disorders, cancer, spontaneous abortions, and stillbirths in adulthood. These effects are not observed among those exposed later in childhood, pointing to heightened biological vulnerability during critical developmental windows. Comparable effects for men are found only for cancer, consistent with women’s greater susceptibility to thyroid dysfunction and higher diagnosis rates. We also uncover behavioral heterogeneity in realized exposure: municipalities with higher private avoidance costs and lower socioeconomic status suffered more severe health impacts. In contrast, political alignment with the national government did not predict compliance with safety advisories. Overall, our findings highlight the enduring health consequences of early-life environmental shocks and the role of behavioral frictions in amplifying biological risks.

We conduct a field experiment to test whether informational messages can nudge organic consumers toward purchasing ``greener'' products that support climate change adaptation. Leveraging data from a large Italian online shop of organic products, we use pasta as a case study to examine consumer responses to information about an ancient durum wheat variety with superior drought tolerance compared to modern wheat. We test two types of messages that frame climate adaptation as achievable through everyday choices: a colloquial information that adopts a relatable tone and a science-based message that presents evidence with visual elements. We find that the colloquial message increases the market share of ``greener'' pasta by 13\%, while the science-based message is effective only among highly environmentally conscious consumers. Effects persist for at least three months and are stronger among women, younger individuals, and those with higher education. The effect of colloquial messaging is amplified among consumers previously experiencing severe or extreme drought conditions.  We observe a backfire effect among the greenest consumers, i.e. those who were already predominantly purchasing ancient pasta.

This article investigates the factors that contributed to the proliferation of online COVID skepticism on Twitter across Italian municipalities in 2020. We demonstrate that sociodemographic factors were likely to mitigate the emergence of skepticism, whereas populist political leanings were more likely to foster it. Furthermore, pre-COVID anti-vaccine sentiment, represented by “old truthers” on Twitter, amplified online COVID skepticism in local communities. Additionally, exploiting the spatial variation in restrictive economic policies with severe implications for suspended workers in nonessentialeconomic sectors, we find that COVID skepticism spreads more in municipalities significantly affected by the economic lockdown. Finally, the diffusion of COVID skepticism is positively associated with COVID vaccine hesitancy.

We use longitudinal electronic clinical data on a large representative sample of the Italian population to estimate the lifetime profile costs of different BMI classes – normal weight, overweight, and obese (I, II, and III) – in a primary care setting. Our research reveals that obese patients generate the highest cost differential throughout their lives compared to normal weight patients. Moreover, we show that overweight individuals spend less than those with normal weight, primarily due to reduced expenditures beginning in early middle age. Our estimates could serve as a vital benchmark for policymakers looking to prioritize public interventions that address the obesity pandemic while considering the increasing obesity rates projected by the OECD until 2030.

We investigate the heterogeneous effects of daily particular matter (PM) pollution on Italian hospitalizations and their costs. We exploit public transportation strikes as plausibly-exogenous shocks in PM. We find that young individuals, an arguably healthy age group, exhibit economically meaningful responses to changes in air pollution. A higher prevalence of pollution-induced hospitalizations also exists among the elderly, low educated individuals and migrants coming from low income countries. Our results imply a large role for differential avoidance behavior driving heterogeneous marginal effects. PM exposure also affects the intensive margin since pollution-induced hospitalizations are not only more frequent but they are characterized by a higher complexity, generating additional costs.

This article evaluates the impact of two nudges on stimulating the use of doggy bags in restaurants. We run a field experiment at 14 restaurants in the province of Turin (Italy). In the first group of restaurants, we manipulated the descriptive social norm. In a second group we changed the default option - whereby customers asked for the doggy bag - by instead directing the waiter to automatically deliver the doggy bag unless told not to. A third group of restaurants was used as a control with no intervention. We find that the social norm intervention led to a sizeable increase in the use of doggy bags, while the default manipulation had a non-statistically significant impact.

The role of environmental information is crucial in driving individuals' environmentally relevant behaviors. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the impact of different sources of information and trust in information providers on four behaviors related to waste management and resource efficiency. In order to consider dynamic effects related to behaviors of different age groups, we adopt a pseudo-panel approach using data from three cross-sectional Eurobarometer surveys. The use of multivariate regression analysis allows us to show the existence of complementarities among “similar” behaviors. Our results suggest that the use of eco-information sources and trust in different providers significantly affect green behaviors of EU citizens towards a ‘truly’ circular economic system.

We test the empirical content of the assumption of preference dependent beliefs using a behavioral model of strategic decision making in which the rankings of individuals over final outcomes in simple games influence their beliefs over the opponent’s behavior. This approach— by analogy with Psychological Game Theory—allows for interdependence between preferences and beliefs but reverses the order of causality. We use existing evidence from a multi-stage experiment in which we first elicit distributional preferences in a Random Dictator Game, then estimate beliefs in a related 2×2  effort game conditional on these preferences. Our structural estimations confirm our working hypothesis on how social preferences shape beliefs: subjects with higher guilt (envy) expect others to put less (more) effort, which reduces the expected difference in payoffs.

We quantify the effects of online vaccine-skepticism spread on vaccine takeup and vaccine-preventable health complications among individuals untargeted by the immunization. We collect the universe of Italian vaccine-related tweets for the 2013-2018 period, label the anti-vax stances through Natural Language Processing, and match them with vaccination coverage and vaccine-preventable hospitalizations data at the most granular level available (municipality and year). We propose a model of opinion dynamics formation on social networks, distinguishing between network formation as a function of homophily and the role of controversialness of vaccine-related topics. With the model and the simulations, we show that pediatric vaccine mandates increased the controversialness of the topic, engendering two opposite clusters that endogenously raised the radicalization of opinions among Twitter users. We then provide a monetary parameter estimate on the effects of vaccine-skeptic online activity for society as a whole and for individuals not- targeted by immunization and overcome the issue of endogenous link formation by proposing an Instrumental Variables approach. We leverage the intransitivity in network connections and the exogeneity in the impact of users’ “friends of friends” to isolate exogenous source of variation for individual vaccine-related stances. We find that a 10 pp increase in the municipality’s anti-vax stance causes a 0.43pp decrease in coverage of the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine, a 2.1 additional hospitalization every 100k residents among individuals untargeted by the immunization (newborns, the immunosuppressed, pregnant women) and an excess expenditure of 7311 euro, representing an 11% increase in health expenses.

 Building on social identity theory, we suggest that natives from stereotyped groups tend to value cultural distance more and think that immigrants are not good for the economy and the fiscal system. We draw upon research showing that overweight and obese individuals suffer from social stigma and discrimination and we investigate the relationship between high body mass and attitudes toward immigrants in Europe. We exploit the appointment of the Belgian Minister of Health to provide causal evidence that stigmatization and stereotyping contribute to negative attitudes toward immigrants. Furthermore, a survey experiment shows that individuals with a higher body mass index prioritize cultural factors over economic ones when facing immigrants.

This paper uses a field experiment to estimate behavioral parameters from a structural model of residential adoption of technology. As our model includes both economic and psychological factors, we are able to identify the role of prices, social norms, social pressure, and curiosity on the adoption decision. We find that prices and social norms influence the adoption decision along different margins, opening up the opportunity for economics and psychology to be strong complements in the diffusion process. In addition, welfare estimates from our structural model point to important household heterogeneities: whereas some consumers welcome the opportunity to purchase and learn about the new technology, for others the inconvenience and social pressure of the ask results in negative welfare. As a whole, our findings highlight that the design of optimal technological diffusion policies will require multiple instruments and a recognition of individual household heterogeneities.