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Are public good games really capturing individuals’ willingness to contribute to real-life public goods? To answer this question, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with communities who own collective goods. In our experiment, subjects voluntarily contribute to a common pool, which can either be subdivided in individual vouchers, as in standard public good games, or used to acquire collective goods, as it happens for real-life public goods. We show that participants’ contributions are larger when the voucher is paid individually, suggesting that individuals’ willingness to contribute to public goods may be overestimated when based on results from laboratory experiments.

Does the gender of the mayor affect the size and composition of public expenditures and revenues? Do male and female mayors react differently to fiscal adjustments? Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design in close mixed gender races for the election of mayors in Italian municipalities in the period 2000-2015, we find that female mayors collect more revenues and spend more than male ones, both in the current and capital account. When constrained to fiscal adjustments by the central government, in a fuzzy difference-in-discontinuities design we find that female mayors reduce expenditures more than men.

This study provides a review of the concept of family ties. It then measures family ties in an unprecedentedly all-encompassing way, accounting for the individual 
eterogeneity (by context, gender, education and age) that may affect them, looking at the patterns of variation among the different dimensions. Indeed, a large number of indicators have been used in the literature to measure family ties, but the inter-relation among their dimensions has rarely been explicitly taken into account. Furthermore, family ties have been assumed to be invariant among different individuals, without any formal test of this assumption. The analysis is based on Italian National Statistical Office (ISTAT) survey on family and social subjects (FFS 2016) on 24,753 individuals. A Structural Equation Model (SEM) is used to measure the different family tie dimensions and to test their invariance by individual characteristics. The results bring out seven dimensions of family ties. These dimensions are invariant by context and gender, but not by education and age. These findings offer a clear picture of the concept of family ties and show how this concept is differently perceived on the basis of some ascribed and some acquired personal characteristics.