Three essays compose this dissertation. The first essay is an empirical investigation of the origins of social trust. I examine how, over the course of history, exposure to climatic risk has influenced the returns to cooperation favoring the emergence of norms of mutual trust that have persisted until today. My empirical analysis, which combines climate data for the period 1500-2000 with contemporary survey data at the sub-national level, supports this hypothesis: regions historically characterized by higher year-to-year climatic variability and more spatially heterogeneous weather display higher trust. Variation in trust is driven by weather patterns during the growing season and by historical rather than recent variability. These results are robust to the inclusion of country fixed-effects, a variety of geographical controls, and regional measures of early politico-economic development.In the second essay I use data from Italy to investigate the effect of media ownership on news content and to examine how viewers respond to changes in partisan bias in media news. I document that after the 2001 national elections, when the control of the government passed from the center-left to the center-right coalition, news content on public television shifted to the right. Using individual survey data, I find robust evidence that viewers responded to these changes by modifying their choice of news programs and their level of confidence in news sources. I document that these behavioral responses significantly, though only partially, offset the movement of public news content to the right.The third essay is a study of the determinants of individual support for redistributions based on the results of laboratory experiments in which a large number of subjects choose are asked to perform redistributive choices under different experimental conditions. My results suggest that: a) most subjects favor a more equal distribution among others; b) support for redistribution is sensitive to the cost of taxation and to the deadweight loss associated with it; c) subjects support less redistribution when the initial distribution is determined according to task performance. The last effect is much larger for males than for females and accounts for most of the gender-based difference in redistributive choices.
Durante, Ruben,
"Essays in Political Economy"
(2010).
Economics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z01834RS
