Smoking, like many health-related behaviors, has "social" aspects. The smoking habits of my neighbors are likely to shape my own smoking habits, due to what is known in economics as “peer effects”. These complementarities in behavior may result from emulation, joint consumption, conformism,...

We study linear quadratic games played on a network where strategies are complements between neighbors and substitutes between agents at distance-two. We provide micro-founded problems where this pattern of interaction is due to a local congestion effect. Equilibrium behavior systematically...

Many types of economic and social activities involve signifcant behavioral complementarities (peer effects) with neighbors in the social network. The same activities often exert externalities, that cumulates in "stocks" affecting agents' welfare and incentives. For instance, smoking is subject...

Many types of economic and social activities involve significant behavioral complementarities (peer effects) with neighbors in the social network. The same activities often exert externalities that cumulate in "stocks" affecting agents' welfare and incentives. For instance, smoking is subject to...

In this paper we study cultural diversity in values or personal norms concerning effort or work ethics, the related and observable diversity in behavior and its economic consequences. Our goal is to investigate the impact on this type of cultural diversity of primitive economic and behavioral...

This paper examines the dynamics of interethnic attitudes in a framework of intergenerational transmission of continuous cultural traits, where children are exposed to parental (vertical) and non-parental (oblique) socializations. Under very general conditions over oblique socialization,...

This paper is based on the intuition of Dragonetti, an old Neapolitan economist, which argues that a society experiences economic and civic development if agents promote values and virtues, more than solely rely on punishments stated by law. We thus study the evolution of cooperative behaviors...

In this paper, we study the welfare effects of monetary policy in a simple overlapping generation economy in which agents voluntary contribute to a public good. Inflation has two effects at equilibrium: it increases voluntary contributions and it misallocates private consumption across time. We...

Incentive regulation in electricity distribution is expected to enlarge its scope, from an input-oriented instrument to one that includes additional, output-based incentives. This creates a potential conflict with more traditional concerns for productive efficiency. In the case of Italy,...

ABSTRACT We assess the causal relationship between health and social capital, measured by generalized trust, both at the individual and the community level. The paper contributes to the literature in two ways: it tackles the problems of endogeneity and reverse causation between social capital...