Recent studies investigated the effect of e-campaigning on the electoral performance. However, little attention has been paid to the content of e-campaigning. Given that political parties broadcast minute-by-minute the campaign messages on social media, this comprehensive and unmediated information can be useful to evaluate the impact of different electoral strategies. Accordingly, this article examines the electoral campaign for the 2013 Italian general election to assess the effectiveness of positive and negative campaigning messages, measured through content analysis of information published on the official Twitter accounts of Italian parties. We evaluate their impact on the share of unsolicited voting intentions expressed on Twitter, measured through an innovative technique of sentiment analysis. Our results show that negative campaign has positive effects and its impact is stronger when the attacker is meanwhile under attack. Conversely, we only find a circumstantial effect of positive campaign related to clientelistic and distributive appeals

We examine the causal effect of legal institutional quality on informal norms of cooperation and study the interaction of institutions and culture in sustaining economic exchange. A total of 346 subjects in Italy and Kosovo played a market game under different and randomly allocated institutional treatments, which generated different incentives to behave honestly, preceded and followed by a noncontractible and nonenforceable trust game. Significant increases in individual trust and trustworthiness followed exposure to better institutions. A 1-percentage-point reduction in the probability of facing a dishonest partner in the market game, which is induced by the quality of legal institutions, increases trust by 7-11 percent and trustworthiness by 13-19 percent. This suggests that moral norms of cooperative behavior can follow improvements in formal institutional quality. Cultural origin, initial trust, and trustworthiness influence opportunistic behavior in markets, but only in the absence of strong formal institutions.

Using longitudinal survey data collected over a period of two years, this paper examines the impact of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment on the time allocated to various household tasks by treated HIV-positive patients and their household members. We study outcomes such as time devoted to housework, firewood and water collection, as well as care-giving and care-seeking. As treatment improves the health and productivity of patients, we find that female patients in particular are able to increase the amount of time they devote to water and firewood collection. This increased productivity of patients coupled with large decreases in the amount of time they spend seeking medical care leads to a reduced burden on children and other household members. We find evidence that boys and girls in treated patients’ households devote less time to housework and other chores. These results suggest that the provision of ARV treatment generates a wide variety of benefits to households in resource-poor settings.

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We use a field experiment to test whether saving and borrowing satisfy demand for lump‐sum accumulation from regular deposits. Inspired by ROSCAs, we offer different credit and saving contracts to subjects. We find that individuals often accept both credit and saving contract across experimental waves. This behaviour can be rationalised by assuming that individuals seek lump‐sum payments and struggle to hold savings. Structural estimation of this model accounts for the behaviour of 75% of participants. Of these, two‐thirds have high demand for lump‐sum accumulation but savings difficulties. These results imply that the distinction between microlending and microsaving is largely illusory.