PRIN 2022 - DiGiur - Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza
The Economics of Beliefs, Culture and Institutions
Breve descrizione, finalità e risultati attesi: This project aims at contributing to the literature on the effects of beliefs and culture on economic outcome, on the interactions between culture, institutions, conflict, and economic outcomes, and advances the use of textual data for the analysis of the political and institutional dimensions of policy. The project contains four lines of research.
1. The first line of research focuses on the effects of religion on science and innovation by studying a natural experiment of history, the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century in Italy. The study posits that, after the proclamation of the Counter-Reformation, Italian cities more favorable to the diffusion of the “holy inquisition” recorded a relative higher number of censorship acts and a lower number of books published (our measure of innovation); this would allow to show pre-existent higher degrees of religiosity may reduce the level of innovation in society.
2. The second line of research aims at contributing to the literature on the interactions between culture, institutions and conflict. The first part assesses whether conflicts mobilize taxpayers towards a common interest public good and make the intergenerational transmission of tax morale more salient. We leverage the occurrence of the American Civil War to provide evidence on the relationship between conflict and tax morale. The second part of the research focuses on the origins and the consequences of conflicts and secessions in weakly-institutionalized and ethnically fragmented societies where the structure of the military plays a key role.
3. The third line of research, on the one hand, explores the link between populism and globalization and, on the other hand, assesses the effectiveness of foreign economic pressure to influence a country’s political and economic decisions. The first part examines whether the fragmentation of production in global value chains may exacerbate people’s resentment and increase the support for populist policies. The second part of this research focuses on the use of sanctions as coercive policy tool. We postulate country can elude restrictions without being noticed by the international community, by trade misinvoicing. The study assesses whether and to what extent countries can venture into sanctions evasion by hiding trade volumes through misinvoicing.
4. The fourth line of research is situated in the field of automated textual analysis applied to social science. Italian institutional speeches and other textual sources can provide helpful insights regarding topic evolution, policy positions, crisis responses, and other related topics. Institutional websites often provide textual information, but there is no comprehensive and standardized corpus for performing text-as-data analyses. The research aims to extract information from oral and written sources by Governors of the Bank of Italy, to provide novel metric for the assessment of monetary policy.
Importo totale del finanziamento: € 291.240 di cui € 228.790 contributo MUR
Importo totale UniUrb: € 65.111 di cui € 49.277 contributo MUR
Periodo: 28/09/2023 – 27/09/2025
Struttura UniUrb di riferimento: Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza
Referente UniUrb: Prof.ssa Dèsirèe Teobaldelli
Codice Progetto: 20227NN492
CUP: H53D23002250006
