Asocial Capital: Civic Culture and Social Distancing during COVID-19

Ruben Durante, Luigi Guiso and Giorgio Gulino
Additional contact information
Ruben Durante: ICREA, UPF, Barcelona School of Economics, IPEG, and CEPR

No 2012, EIEF Working Papers Series from Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF)

Abstract: Social distancing can slow the spread of COVID-19 if citizens comply with it and internalize the cost of their mobility on others. We study how civic values mediate this process using data on mobility across Italian provinces between January and May 2020. We find robust evidence that after the virus outbreak mobility declined, but significantly more in areas with higher civic capital, both before and after a mandatory national lockdown. Simulating a SIR model calibrated on Italy, we estimate that if all provinces had the same civic capital as those in top-quartile, COVID-related deaths would have been ten times lower.

Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2020, Revised 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.eief.it/eief/images/WP_20.12.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Asocial capital: Civic culture and social distancing during COVID-19 (2021)
Working Paper: Asocial Capital: Civic Culture and Social Distancing during COVID-19 (2020)
Working Paper: Asocial Capital: Civic Culture and Social Distancing during COVID-19 (2020)
Working Paper: Asocial capital: Civic culture and social distancing during COVID-19 (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eie:wpaper:2012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EIEF Working Papers Series from Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Facundo Piguillem ().