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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