Climate change poses significant threats to agricultural communities worldwide and may affect psychological wellbeing through increased environmental uncertainty. This study investigates the association between climate vulnerability and household subjective wellbeing among farmers in seven low- and middle-income countries (Argentina, India, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Solomon Islands, Vietnam, and Zambia). The dataset contains secondary survey data on approximately 15,000 farmers involved in International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) development programs. We estimate OLS regressions in which geographical altitude (distance above sea level) proxies climate vulnerability, controlling for socioeconomic and geographic characteristics including gender, age, education, income, distance from the equator, and country and wave fixed effects. Results show that altitude is positively and significantly associated with self-assessed household wellbeing: a 1000-meter increase in altitude corresponds to a 0.33 standard deviation higher wellbeing score (p < 0.001). The association remains robust to alternative specifications and holds when replacing altitude with average annual temperature, which is negatively and significantly associated with wellbeing. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that farmers living in hotter and more climate-exposed areas experience lower subjective wellbeing, potentially reflecting both material vulnerability and anticipatory climate-related stress. Adaptation policies and loss-anddamage funds should account for geographic vulnerability when targeting prevention and resilience investments in rural areas.

This study investigates prosocial behavior in chains of donations using variations of the dictator game. We explore how the possibility of direct and indirect giving influences generosity and welfare. Our results reveal that individuals are more generous when their actions benefit multiple recipients, even indirectly, despite the risks of reduced effectiveness due to intermediaries. Still, the indirect recipient obtains a lower welfare outcome than the direct recipient as the intermediate recipient deliberately withholds part of the dictator’s giving, passing on less than expected by the initial donor.

This paper investigates the relationship between perceived intergenerational mobility, local opportunity, and beliefs about the causes of poverty in Italy. Using survey data, we estimate probit models in which the dependent variable indicates whether individuals attribute poverty primarily to lack of effort rather than to circumstances beyond personal control. The results show that subjective intergenerational mobility is one of the strongest correlates of poverty attributions. Respondents who report being in a much higher socioeconomic position than their parents are substantially more likely to blame poverty on lack of effort, while those reporting downward mobility are significantly less likely to do so. These associations remain large after controlling for income, education, labour-market status, subjective economic conditions, and local economic indicators. The paper further examines cases in which personal mobility perceptions diverge from provincial opportunity conditions. The results suggest a nuanced pattern: perceived downward mobility is consistently associated with lower individual blame for poverty, while upward mobility in lowopportunity environments does not necessarily translate into stronger meritocratic beliefs. Overall, the findings link subjective mobility, territorial opportunity, and poverty attributions, contributing to research on redistribution, inequality perceptions, and subjective social status.

This study examines how exposure to regional inequality can be related to fairness beliefs about the poor. The hypothesis is that greater inequality is associated with a greater awareness of social disparities, resulting in a higher consensus on the necessity of helping society’s left behind. Using data from the European Social Survey across multiple regions in 25 countries, our results show a significant positive relationship between regional inequality and support for social care targeting the most disadvantaged. We find some evidence of the effect being particularly concentrated among higher income and more educated individuals. Our main findings remain robustacross multiple specifications. The research contributes to the literature by highlighting how actual inequality may shape normative beliefs about social fairness, moving beyond traditional redistribution preferences.

We develop a dynamic optimization model to study the link between photovoltaic (PV) investments, energy production, and environmental impact. The model is formulated as a continuous-time optimal control problem with one control variable (investment) and two state variables (energy output and emissions). Applying Pontryagin's maximum principle, we derive a closed-form solution for the optimal investment path. Key inputs include PV productivity, costs, depreciation, and emission savings versus fossil fuels. The results show that the optimal investment increases with the efficiency of PV, the ecological benefits and the weight given to sustainability, identifying conditions in which PV increases both energy output and emission reduction. We also find that better storage technologies improve the long-term viability of renewables and may be more politically feasible than carbon taxation. Simulations test the sensitivity of the net zero year to cost changes, regional differences, and shocks from environmental policies in China and the US, offering policy-relevant insights to align renewable energy investments with environmental and economic goals.

The experimental literature in economics largely acknowledges the role of social capital in social payoff enhancing behavior and/or voluntary provision of public goods. However, social capital is often measured using different proxies that, in principle, may have different impacts on contributions. In this article, we unpack social capital in three dimensions (i.e., school, family, and friends) and we analyze which dimension matters for contributions in economic experiments. We collect data from an ultimatum game, a trust game, and a public good game carried out with children in primary and secondary schools in Sicily, Italy. To measure social capital, we also collect detailed information on social attitudes related to different contexts. We find that, as expected, social capital matters for contributions. More interestingly, we find that the only component that affects contributions is social capital at school. Our findings shed a light on how the school environment may be extremely important for the formation of social capital, especially when this is linked to behavior within the same environment.

We develop a spatial competition model in which firms choose prices and an endogenous reach: the set of consumers they can serve without horizontal mismatch. Technology operates through two channels, lowering the cost of expanding reach in geographic or product space and reducing the cost of contacting consumers while demand remains active. Within the non-overlap regime, the symmetric interior solution features positive but incomplete reach. Symmetric expansion leaves equilibrium prices and market shares unchanged, yet generates a strategic arms race in which firms incur costs to attract marginal consumers without gaining a lasting competitive advantage. Better reach technology increases reach and consumer surplus, while its welfare effect becomes negative once strategic overinvestment dominates. Relative to the social optimum, private reach can be excessive or insufficient depending on reach costs and technological efficiency. With transient demand, mobility also affects whether a seller meets a consumer before the purchase opportunity expires. The private return to mobility decomposes into socially productive match creation and pure business stealing. As demand becomes persistent, the productive component vanishes while the business-stealing incentive remains. The framework applies to customization, mobile delivery, patrol intensity, and platformenabled matching across a range of modern markets.

We study political competition when voters may abstain because neither candidate is ideologically close enough to justify participation in a framework of increasing polarization. We study the effect of polarization by introducing a symmetric family of voter distributions that moves continuously from center-peaked to uniform to U-shaped while leaving the median voter fixed. Candidates maximize their share of votes cast, the electoral analogue of marketshare competition in the Hotelling model. With stable left-right party identities, the unique equilibrium is convergence at the median when the electorate is center-peaked and maximal feasible divergence when it is U-shaped; the uniform distribution is the knife-edge between the two regimes. Candidate divergence has an important compositional effect on participation. It initially remobilizes previously alienated extremists but, once candidate constituencies cease to overlap, creates abstention among moderates. For sufficiently strong divergence, the electorate that actually votes becomes more polarized than the underlying eligible electorate. We derive a unique threshold at which this polarization reversal occurs and obtain its comparative statics. Greater underlying voter polarization raises the required degree of candidate divergence, while a larger ideological reservation distance lowers it. In the U-shaped equilibrium, when candidate divergence leaves a politically unrepresented center, equilibrium divergence necessarily exceeds this threshold: all residual abstention is centrist and the voting electorate is more polarized than the population from which it is drawn. A dynamic extension shows how gradual candidate adjustment can generate rising abstention followed by turnout recovery even while moderate citizens progressively disappear from electoral participation.

Using data from the European Social Survey we find that women overestimate significantly domestic unemployment after controlling for all relevant concurring factors. We also show that our findings are robust across age, income, and education subsamples, and in different countries and ESS waves. The gender bias is not accounted for by discrimination or differences in expectations about future unemployment and persists when we assume that respondents have in mind their gender-specific unemployment rate. We provide evidence in favour of the affect intensity channel showing that women report significantly higher values for affect intensity proxies and that subgroups with higher predicted affect intensity have significantly higher unemployment misperception.

This paper examines the relationship between four freedom orientations-libertarian, utilitarian, civic, and communitarian-and subjective well-being. We conceptualize liberty orientations as varying in their prioritization of individual autonomy relative to the general interest. Using nationally representative survey data, we estimate a recursive generalized structural equation model (GSEM) with instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity between liberty orientations and well-being. Falsification tests confirm the validity of our instruments. The results indicate that civic and communitarian orientations are positively and significantly associated with higher levels of life satisfaction compared to libertarian and utilitarian orientations. The fit between freedom orientations and local institutional quality matters since living in areas with low institutional quality reduces the positive nexus between being civic or communitarian and subjective well-being. Our findings suggest that the value-context fit and value systems emphasizing voluntary alignment with, or prioritization of, the general interest foster higher well-being, consistent with research strands highlighting the importance of social relationships, generativity, procedural utility, and collective purpose discussed in the paper. Our contribution is both theoretical, by refining the typology of liberty orientations, and empirical, by providing causal evidence of their effects on subjective well-being.

This study explores how individual and regional factors influence religiosity across Europe, focusing on education, income, age, and health as institutional drivers. Testing three sociological hypotheses, we find that education has a U-shaped effect on religious engagement, while age, health, and relative income significantly predict religiosity. Regional economic and educational contexts show no consistent influence. Our findings contribute to institutional economics by illuminating how education and income shape cultural norms and collective belief systems, underscoring the enduring interplay between personal conditions and institutional structures in shaping religious behavior.

We shed light on the paradox of the relationship between civic participation (measured by a composite indicator of Sustainable Economy Awareness and Lifestyles (SEAL)) and life satisfaction by showing that, even though the former significantly contributes to the latter, it is practiced by few. We find a reason why by showing with principal component analysis and instrumental variable approaches that 'stimulus goods' (goods whose enjoyment requires previous effort and investment) are among the main factors associated with SEAL. The civic participation path to life satisfaction is uphill since stimulus goods require previous investment to be enjoyed. Our policy implication is that experiences that can trigger investment in stimulus goods are crucial to creating the virtuous circle of civic participation, enjoyment of stimulus goods and life satisfaction, with positive effects not only on individual life but also on the health of democracy and the achievement of sustainable development goals.

Historical episodes such as the World War I "live-and-let-live" system and the Christmas Truce of 1914 demonstrate that opposing military units can establish spontaneous, local cooperation even in extreme conflict environments. Such cooperative behavior is typically fragile and temporary, while large-scale wars persist. We develop a hierarchical decision problem in which local units adopt contingent strategies that depend on interactions, accumulated payoffs, and signals from a central command. The command authority can impose enforcement that penalizes non-aggression to prolong hostilities. Our model features a continuous space of parametric strategies and formalizes replicator dynamics over the population. We analytically characterize the conditions under which local cooperation emerges as a stable evolutionary equilibrium and identify critical thresholds of central enforcement that destroy cooperative equilibria. We show that stable peace requires either alignment of command incentives with frontline welfare, external constraints on enforcement, or diminishing political returns to conflict. The framework provides a micro-founded explanation for the persistence of war despite locally beneficial cooperation.

We define generativity as the expected social impact of a given action, distinguishing it from earlier notions of pure altruism and warm glow, and modeling it as a key driver of subjective wellbeing. We test the impact of generativity on subjective wellbeing using data from the European Social Survey and find that generativity is positively and significantly associated with subjective wellbeing. Our results are consistent across survey waves and various demographic subgroups (gender, age, and education) and are significant when considering only individuals who live in the same country. Furthermore, by applying an instrumental variable approach, we also examine the causal relationship between generativity and subjective wellbeing. Our findings imply that public policies should establish conditions that enable and promote citizens’ generative behavior and practices.

Why do workers exert effort in environments where monitoring is imperfect and sanctions are weak? The standard efficiency wage framework explains effort as a response to extrinsic incentives where higher wages discourage shirking by increasing the cost of job loss. In this paper, we propose and test an alternative mechanism based on intrinsic motivation, which we term generative efficiency. Using survey data and structural equation modeling, we show that workplace participation does not directly affect productivity, measured as the absence of quiet quitting. Instead, participation operates indirectly by enhancing workers' well-being, which in turn significantly increase effort and reduce opportunistic behavior. We also find that participation reduces turnover intentions through its impact on the perceived meaningfulness of work. Our results suggest that effort can be sustained even in the absence of strong monitoring or wage premia, through internalized motivations linked to participation and meaning. This provides an extension to the efficiency wage literature by identifying a nonpecuniary pathway to efficiency that relies on intrinsic rather than disciplinary mechanisms. These findings have important implications for both theory and practice, highlighting the role of participatory governance and workplace meaning as substitutes for traditional incentive schemes.

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We test the effect of the first wave COVID-19 lockdown on quality of air across Italian municipalities. We show that lockdown measures, as expected, reduced outdoor (car transit and workplace) mobility, while increasing (indoor) residential stay. We expect the first effect to contribute to better quality of air, although counterbalanced by the second due to increased heating at home. Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis, since the combined effect of lockdown measures on particulate matter concentration is nonlinear and determined by the interplay of two exogenous shocks (the lockdown decision and the nonsynchronous centralised heating halt in Italian climatic zones). More specifically, in the first lockdown month the increase in house heating generated an abnormal rise in particulate matter concentration with respect to the corresponding months of the previous years. The effect was reversed in the following two months when centralized heating halted. Evidence of the lockdown effects on mobility is consistent with the lockdown effect on outdoor mobility since we observe a significant fall in nitrogen dioxide. Policy implications of our paper is that higher ecological sustainability of heating and mobility can reduce the trade-off between economic/social activity and environmental sustainability.