The Economics of Obituaries
Raffaella Intinghero,
Pietro Lazzaretto and
Paolo Manasse
Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna
Abstract:
Obituaries are traditionally seen as expressions of grief and remembrance. We argue that they also have an underappreciated economic role: they are vehicles for strategic social and economic signaling. In this paper, we develop a simple theoretical framework in which paid obituaries serve as a form of self-promotion for the authors, especially when the deceased is a prominent public figure. We then test this hypothesis using data from Italy, exploiting the variation in mortality caused by the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment. We show that higher mortality rates are associated with increases in per-capita obituaries, driven not by informational needs but by strategic advertising motives. Our results suggest that obituaries function as a marketplace for visibility and status, where social and economic incentives intersect.
JEL-codes: A10 A13 D71 D85 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1209
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