Francesco Mureddu

Pathos & ethos: emotions and willingness to pay for tobacco products

In this article we use data from a multi-country Randomized Control Trial study on the effect of anti-tobacco pictorial warnings on an individual’s emotions and behavior. By exploiting the exogenous variations of images as an instrument, we are able to identify the effect of emotional responses. We use a range of outcome variables, from cognitive (risk perception and depth of processing) to behavioural (willingness to buy and willingness to pay). Our findings suggest that the odds of buying a tobacco product can be reduced by 80% if the negative affect elicited by the images increases by one standard deviation. More importantly from a public policy perspective, not all emotions behave alike, as eliciting shame, anger, or distress proves more effective in reducing smoking than fear and disgust. JEL Classification C26, C99, D03, I18 PsycINFO classification 2360; 3920

AGGLOMERATION AND GROWTH WITH ENDOGENOUS EXPENDITURE SHARES

We develop a New Economic Geography and Growth model which, by using a CES utility function in the second-stage optimization problem, allows for expenditure shares in industrial goods to be endogenously determined. The implications of our generalization are quite relevant. In particular, we obtain the following novel results - 1) two additional non-symmetric interior steady states emerge for some intermediate values of trade costs. These steady-states are stable if the industrial and the traditional goods are either good or very poor substitutes, while they are unstable for intermediate (yet lower than one) values of the intersectoral elasticity of substitution. In the latter case, the model displays three interior steady states - the symmetric and the core-periphery allocations - which are stable at the same time; 2) agglomeration processes may always take place, whatever the degree of market integration, provided that the traditional and the industrial goods are sufficiently good substitutes; 3) the regional rate of growth is affected by the interregional allocation of economic activities even in the absence of localized spillovers, so that geography always matters for growth and 4) the regional rate of growth is affected by the degree of market openness - in particular, depending on whether the traditional and the industrial goods are good or poor substitutes, economic integration may be respectively growth-enhancing or growth-detrimental.

Passive Expert-Sourcing for Policy Making in the European Union

The public sector gradually starts exploiting the crowdsourcing ideas initially developed in the private sector. However, there is much less knowledge on efficient and effective methods and practices for public sector citizen-sourcing in comparison with private sector crowd-sourcing, so extensive research is required in this area. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an ICT-based method for ‘passive expert-sourcing’, with the latter term denoting the collection of policy relevant information, knowledge and ideas from experts, which aims at supporting policy making by the European Union (EU) by leveraging its large policy community. Its theoretical foundation is previous theoretical work on the relationships between democracy and technocracy, and also on policy networks. The main technological pillars of the proposed method are: EU policy experts’ profiling and reputation management, relevant documents’ opinion mining and relevance rating, and finally advanced visualized presentation of them. Finally, a first evaluation of the proposed method is presented, leading to encouraging results.

Structural Change and Growth in a NEG Model

This paper presents a New Economic Geography model of structural change, agglomeration and growth. By assuming the same non-homothetic preference structure as Murata (2008), we obtain similar results in that a progressive reduction of trade costs allows the economy to pass from a pre-industrialized to an industrialized stage and then, within the latter, from a dispersed to an urbanized regime. However, the introduction of capital accumulation and the dynamic setting of our model open the door to a richer set of implications. First, an additional stage is introduced as, for some intermediate values of trade costs, a multiple equilibria regime emerges with the symmetric and the core-periphery equilibria stable at the same time. Second, the introduction of non-homotheticity introduces a new channel through which growth is affected by trade costs and agglomeration. In particular, integration is always growth-enhancing while agglomeration is growth-detrimental.