@article{ref1,
title="Voting, contagion and the trade-off between public health and political rights: quasi-experimental evidence from the Italian 2020 polls",
journal="Journal of economic behavior and organization",
year="2022",
author="Mello, Marco and Moscelli, Giuseppe",
volume="200",
number="",
pages="1025-1052",
abstract="Natural disasters raise challenging trade-offs between public health safety and inalienable rights like the active involvement in political choices through voting. We exploit a quasi-experimental setting provided by multiple ballots across regions and municipalities during the Italian 2020 elections to estimate the effect of voters' turnout on the spread of COVID-19. By employing an event-study design with a two-stage Control Function strategy, we find that post-poll new COVID infections increased by an average of 1.1% for each additional percentage point of turnout. Based on these estimates and real political events, we also show through a simulation that in-person voting during a high-infection regime may have a large impact on public health outcomes, more than doubling new infections, deaths and hospitalizations. These findings suggest that policy-makers' responses to natural disasters should be flexible and contingent to the emergency severity, in order to minimize social costs for citizens.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0167-2681",
doi="10.1016/j.jebo.2022.07.008",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2022.07.008"
}