"Ancestry, gender and language - The role of culture in economic development"

This thesis is a combination of research questions in development economics and economics of culture, with an emphasis on the role of ancestry, gender and language policies in shaping inequality of opportunities and socio-economic outcomes across different segments of a society. The first chapter shows both theoretically and empirically that heterogeneity in risk attitudes can be traced to the ethnic origins and ancestral way of living. In particular, I construct a measure of historical nomadism at the ethnicity level and link it to contemporary individual-level data on various proxies of risk attitudes. I exploit exogenous variation in biodiversity to build a novel instrument for nomadism: distance to domestication points. I find that descendants of ethnic groups that historically practiced nomadism (i) are more willing to take risks, (ii) value security less, and (iii) have riskier health behavior. The second chapter evaluates the nature of a trade-off between the advantages of female labor participation and the positive effects of female education. This work exploits a triple difference identification strategy relying on exogenous spike in cotton price and spatial variation in suitability for cotton, and split sample analyses based on the exogenous allocation of land contracts. Results show that gender differences in parental investments in patriarchal societies can be reinforced by the type of agricultural activity, while positive economic shocks may further exacerbate this bias, additionally crowding out higher possibilities to invest in female education. The third chapter brings novel evidence of the role of the language policy in building national sentiments, affecting educational and occupational choices. Here I focus on the case of Uzbekistan and estimate the effects of exposure to the Latin alphabet on informational literacy, education and career choices. I show that alphabet change affects people's informational literacy and the formation of certain educational and labour market trends.

Audience attitudes towards simil sync: a pilot study

This thesis is based on a pilot investigation which explores the attitudes of a sample of Italian viewers towards the simil sync technique which in Italy is used for the dub of non-fictional television contents. The thesis seeks to analyse and define the characteristics of this dubbing modality which is often considered by scholars and professionals in the dubbing industry a hybrid modality of standard synchronised dubbing and voice-over. In order to investigate viewers’ attitudes, I organised 4 focus groups sessions which, due to the impact of Covid-19 pandemic, were carried out online. The online recruitment of participants, which was a difficult task, resulted in a small sample of eighteen participants (and two interviewees). The four online focus groups revealed that participants were aware of the simil sync technique. They recognised that the clips were dubbed in a different modality from standard synchronised dubbing. The characteristic that was mostly mentioned for detecting simil sync was the original soundtrack that was audible below the dub, followed by the identification of the genre of the programme in the clip and the absence of lip sync. Moreover, while simil sync with a barely audible original soundtrack received neutral or positive attitudes, simil sync with a more audible original soundtrack, instead, was tolerated or considered annoying. Simil sync passed unnoticed in the in-depth interviews in which the discussion about dubbing was not focused on the distinction between two dubbing modalities, for instance simil sync versus standard synchronised dubbing, but rather on the distinction between programmes that originated in Italian and those that were translated into Italian from another language and then dubbed.