PhD Candidate Martins Habets will defend his thesis "Environmental stress, political incentives, and social norms: essays on the determinants of individual behavior"
This thesis is composed of three essays.
In the first chapter, I investigate how temperature variations influence domestic violence (DV) in Mexico City. Combining detailed crime reports, independent helpline data, and high-frequency weather records, I find a positive, contemporaneous, and linear relationship between daily temperature and DV, with a 1°C rise leading to a 2.8% increase in DV reports. This effect emerges even under moderate climatic conditions, suggesting continuous risk beyond extreme heat events. My findings rule out that changes in victims’ reporting behavior entirely drive the relationship. Exploiting detailed census data from nearly 2,500 neighborhoods, I show that temperature-induced DV disproportionately affects poorer areas, revealing how environmental stressors exacerbate existing urban inequalities.
In the second chapter, jointly with Marco Battaglini, Valerio Leone Sciabolazza, and Eleonora Patacchini, we explore concerns about conflicts of interest raised by financial activities of elected officials. While firms are known to benefit from political connections, less is understood about the private returns politicians may obtain from such relationships. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by examining whether legislators obtain private financial returns from meeting with lobbyists. Combining disclosures of U.S. congressional financial transactions (2011-2022) with records of lobby meetings, we implement a difference-in-differences design at the legislator–sector level. We find that first-time lobbying exposure raises the probability of trading in the corresponding sector by 25-40 percent. Effects are stronger for House members and those in their final term. The results suggest that legislators use information from lobbyists in personal investments, highlighting private benefits from office and informing debates on congressional stock-trading bans.
In the final chapter, jointly with Libertad González, we study whether, the presence of a sister, rather than a brother, influences adolescents’ own gender attitudes at a time when they are forming their identities. We investigate this question through a school-based lab-in-the-field study of 12–14-year-olds in Barcelona, which directly elicits gender-role attitudes and perceived social norms using a rich set of survey measures and incentivized coordination games. Our identification relies on the as-good-as-random sex of the second-born sibling among first-born adolescents, conditional on parents having a second child. Overall, no clear detectable effects emerge. Our findings suggest that, in early adolescence, sibling sex plays at most a limited role relative to other forces – such as parents, peers, and school environments – in shaping gender norms.
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