Narratives and opinion polarization: a survey experiment.

We explore the impact of narratives on beliefs and policy opinions through a survey experiment that exposes US subjects to two media-based explanations of the causes of COVID-19. The Lab Narrative ascribes the pandemic to human error and scientific misconduct in a Chinese lab, and the Nature Narrative describes the natural causes of the virus. First, we find that both narratives influence individual beliefs about COVID-19 origins.

Trust in the Health System and COVID-19 Treatment.

COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe at an exponential speed, infecting millions and overwhelming even the most prepared healthcare systems. Concerns are looming that the healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are mostly unprepared to combat the virus because of limited resources. The problems in LMICs are exacerbated by the fact that citizens in these countries generally exhibit low trust in the healthcare system because of its low quality, which could trigger a number of uncooperative behaviors.

Political Narratives and the US Partisan Gender Gap.

Social scientists have devoted considerable research effort to investigate the determinants of the Partisan Gender Gap (PGG), whereby US women (men) tend to exhibit more liberal (conservative) political preferences over time. Results of a survey experiment run during the COVID-19 emergency and involving 3,086 US residents show that exposing subjects to alternative narratives on the causes of the pandemic increases the PGG: relative to a baseline treatment in which no narrative manipulation is implemented, exposing subjects to either the (claiming that COVID-19 was caused by a lab accident in Wuhan) or the (according to which COVID-19 originated in the wildlife) makes women more liberal. The polarization effect documented in our experiment is magnified by the political orientation of participants' state of residence: the largest PGG effect is between men residing in Republican-leaning states and women living in Democratic-leaning states.

Cervical cancer screening invitations in low and middle income countries: Evidence from Armenia.

Roughly 90 percent of cervical cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where the lack of adequate infrastructures hampers screening, while informational, cultural, and socio-economic barriers limit participation in the few programs that do exist. We conducted a field experiment with the Armenian cervical cancer screening program to determine whether, despite these barriers, the simple, economical invitation strategies adopted in high-income countries could enhance screening take-up in LMICs. We find that letters of invitation increase screening take-up, especially when there are follow-up reminders.

A survey experiment on information, taxpayer preferences, and perceived adequacy of the tax burden.

We report results of a survey experiment aimed at testing whether eliciting taxpayer preferences on how to allocate the collected taxes over national public goods as well as providing information about the composition of the public expenditure influence the tax rate that taxpayers consider adequate to pay. We find that information exerts no effects on the level of the adequate tax rate. However, taxpayers are willing to accept a higher tax burden when they express their preferences on how to use tax revenues to finance public goods and services.