This thesis contains four essays: two focus on different themes of historical political economy, and two consist of informational experiments aimed at testing the efficacy of vaccination informational campaigns.
Chapter 1 finds that contrary to theoretical expectations, the theocratic Papal States did not have a long-term effect on pro-Catholic political preferences and religiosity. To net out confounders and attain causal identification, I exploit the exogenous northern border of the Papal States, River Po, and propose a novel extension of geographic regression discontinuity designs, the Difference-In- Geographic discontinuities (DIG). I then argue that pre-existing inheritance norms drove political preferences towards leftist positions and decreased the importance of religiosity since the Early Middle Ages, preventing theocratic institutions from having persistent effects.
Chapter 2 presents a large informational field experiment conducted in Sweden in 2021. It tests whether emotionally or scientifically framed campaigns that promote the HPV vaccine affect recipients differently based on their immigration and educational backgrounds. 7616 Swedish mothers stratified by education and immigration background received a leaflet on their children’s upcoming HPV vaccination opportunity. The leaflet’s framing was randomized between emotional and scientific, with additional control units receiving an uninformative reminder. Mothers with compulsory schooling exposed to scientific framing increased their uptake by 5.7 percentage points (7.25%). The effect was driven by attentive readers with little previous HPV knowledge. Emotional framing decreased uptake by 4.8 percentage points (5.41%) among high school-educated mothers who read superficially and were more hesitant at baseline.
Chapter 3 exploits the natural experiment of the fascist colonization of the Pontine Marshes (1932-1941) to study the effect of same-origin networks and diversity on economic success and nation-building in a rural context. Settlers were randomly assigned to land plots under a sharecropping regime. Same-origin networks improved the chance of staying in the Pontine Marshes and securing land ownership, as mutual aid generated productivity enhancements and social amenities. Diversity operated through skills’ transferability but had more limited effects, which is peculiar to rural settings.
Finally, Chapter 4 conducts a survey experiment to promote the flu vaccine on a representative sample of Italians above age 40. It tests the efficacy of Motivational Interviewing (MI) in video informational campaigns. While this gentle communication technique proved effective in more costly patient-doctor direct interactions and is now recommended by health authorities worldwide, applying it to video campaigns can be detrimental. MI improves the perception of the informant: however, it reduces willingness to vaccinate and does not impact actual vaccination uptake. Causal forest analyses reveal that only a minority of older recipients with a worse health status react positively, implying that MI should not be adopted in large-scale campaigns.
The event will take place in HYBRID modality.