Exposure to COVID-19 Is Associated With Increased Altruism, Particularly at the Local Level

Theory posits that situations of existential threat will enhance prosociality in general and particularly toward others perceived as belonging to the same group as the individual (parochial altruism). Yet, the global character of the COVID-19 pandemic may blur boundaries between ingroups and outgroups and engage altruism at a broader level. In an online experiment, participants from the U.S. and Italy chose whether to allocate a monetary bonus to a charity active in COVID-19 relief efforts at the local, national, or international level. The purpose was to address two important questions about charitable giving in this context: first, what influences the propensity to give, and second, how is charitable giving distributed across different levels of collective welfare? We found that personal exposure to COVID-19 increased donations relative to those not exposed, even as levels of environmental exposure (numbers of cases locally) had no effect. With respect to targets of giving, we found that donors predominantly benefitted the local level; donations toward country and world levels were half as large. Social identity was found to influence charity choice in both countries, although an experimental manipulation of identity salience did not have any direct effect

The heterogenous relationship between migration and innovation: Evidence from Italy

This paper offers a novel take on the relationship between migration and regional innovation by analysing the impact of both international and internal migration flows across Italian provinces, by skill level, and on three types of intellectual property rights (IPRs), namely patents, trademarks and design rights. Allowing us to capture innovation beyond technology and high-tech manufacturing, our results shed light on the relationship between different types of migrant human capital and this array of innovative outcomes. Focusing on Italian provinces in the period 2003–2012, our empirical analysis reveals that internal migration is more significantly related to innovation than international migration. Moreover, medium- and high-skilled migrants are positively associated with all three types of IPRs, while low-skilled migration has a negative association. There are also significant differences across provinces, with a clear distinction between the more economically developed Northern provinces and the rest of Italy