A successful fight against COVID-19 greatly depends on citizens' adherence to the restrictive measures, which may not suffice alone. Making use of a containment index, data on sanctions, and Google's movement trends across Italian provinces, complemented by other sources, we investigate the extent to which compliance with the mobility limitations has affected the number of infections and deaths over time, for the period running from February 24, 2020 to February 23, 2021. We find proof of a deterrent effect on mobility given by the increase in sanction rate and positivity rate among the population. We also show how the pandemic dynamics have changed between the first and the second wave of the emergency. Lots of people could be spared by incorporating greater interventions and many more are at stake, despite the recent boost in vaccinations. Informing citizens about the effects and purposes of the restrictive measures has become increasingly important throughout the various phases of the pandemic.

The present study is concerned with the reactions of consumers and firms to economic downturns. Specifically, it investigates to what extent the advertising has been used as marketing instrument to support brand sales during the downturn in business cycle (Great Recession 2011-2015) and whether advertising expenditures has significantly increased sales. The focus is on three Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Italian food categories. We use Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag models (ARDL). As a whole, our results support the presence of significant effects of own advertising for a selection of brands, not the whole, within the three analyzed categories. Moreover, advertising spending by competitors acts negatively in two categories out of three.

The diffusion of COVID-19 pandemic among Italian Regions has been very uneven. The intensity of measures introduced to contrast its spread also shows a high heterogeneity among local jurisdiction, but this does not correspond, prima facie, with the intensity of the pandemic. What shapes the stringency of responses across different localities? Various factors could be hypothesised to be at play: factors related to the intensity of the pandemic, to the political and ideological orientation of governing authorities, to the models of growth and development characterising regional economic systems, and to the strength of lobbying groups pushing for more or less stringent responses. To address these questions, we elaborate a regional stringency index and analyse (using CART regression trees and other statistical methods) its relationships with some of these factors. The results show that the main driver of stringency (in an inverse way) is the weight of exports on regional GDP, suggesting that economic interests and business power might play an important role in shaping political responses to pandemics.

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