Antidepressant (AD) consumption has been steadily increasing in the last decade in most countries. The explanations suggested by researchers for this increment are still under scrutiny. This study attempts to identify the determinants of AD consumption by exploiting small area variations from Switzerland between 2003 and 2014. We observe that two specific drugs - Citalopram and Escitalopram -...
In this article, we study politicians’ – rather than voters’ – responses to the main political scandal in Italian recent history (Tangentopoli), and overcome endogeneity concerns by analysing the local implications of this national corruption scandal. We find that local politicians withdraw support for incumbents in parties hit by Tangentopoli – inducing increased political...
The legal realist Robert Lee Hale offered a definition of freedom as a zero-sum game: each volitional freedom implies some degree of coercion over other people's freedom, and at the same time one's freedom is subject to some degree of control and coercion by others. The objective of our work is to develop this idea along with the theory of positional goods. This allows us to illustrate the externalities deriving from the ‘consumption' of freedom and detail the role of the lawmaker in accordance with the Halean contribution
