Maria Bigoni

Objectives: The Interpersonal Mindfulness in Parenting (IM-P) scale is a self-report questionnaire validated and adapted in several countries. This study aimed to assess the psychometric properties and factor structure of the Italian version (IM-P-IT) across three different samples of Italian parents of preschool-aged children. Method: In Study 1, 867 parents completed the IM-P-IT. In Studies 2 and 3, 561 and 928 parents filled out the IM-P-IT and self-reported questionnaires examining parental behaviors and stress. Result: The exploratory factor analysis in Study 1 identified a 22-item version of the IM-P-IT with a five-factor structure: (1) Listening with Full Attention, (2) Self-Regulation in the Parenting Relationship, (3) Emotional Awareness and Compassion for the Child, (4) Emotional Non-Reactivity in Parenting, and (5) Non-Judgmental Acceptance in Parenting. The five-factor model was confirmed in Study 2 (CFI = 0.93; RMSEA = 0.05; SRMR = 0.05) and Study 3 (CFI = 0.91; RMSEA = 0.06; SRMR = 0.06) through confirmatory factor analysis. Good internal consistency was observed (Study 1, α = 0.88; Study 2, α = 0.89; Study 3, α = 0.89). In Studies 2 and 3, convergent validity was demonstrated, as interpersonal mindfulness in parenting positively correlated with positive parenting behaviors (e.g., sensitivity, consistency, engagement in activities) and negatively correlated with negative parenting behaviors (e.g., over-reactivity) and parenting stress. Conclusions: The three validation studies confirmed the reliability and validity of the Italian version of the Interpersonal Mindfulness in Parenting scale, providing a valuable tool for assessing mindful parenting in Italy for research and clinical purposes.

Historically, shocks originating in the financial sector often spilled over into the real sector with dramatic consequences. We study in the lab how interventions targeting disclosure and capital requirements of financial intermediaries can reduce insolvencies or prevent their negative effects from propagating to the broader economy. In our two-sector economy, consumers and producers can fund financial intermediaries, who, in turn, provide them with liquidity to settle trades. However, intermediaries may undertake risky investments and become insolvent, which depresses real economic activity. In the experiment, insolvencies were frequent. As a consequence, consumers and producers often refused to fund intermediaries, which lowered the trade volume. Imposing the disclosure of risky investments did not reduce risk-taking and insolvencies. Instead, imposing capital requirements prevented insolvencies from disrupting real economic activity, thus boosting financial intermediation and trade.

It is often argued that inequality may worsen coordination failures as it exacerbates conflicts of interests, making it difficult to achieve an efficient outcome. This paper shows that this needs not to be always the case. In a context in which two interacting populations have conflicting interests, we introduce ex-ante inequality, by making one population stronger than the other. This reduces the cost of miscoordination for the weakest population, and at the same time it makes some equilibria more equitable than others, thus more focal and attractive for inequality-averse players. Hence, both social preferences and strategic risk considerations may ease coordination. We provide experimental support for this hypothesis, by considering an extended two-population Hawk–Dove game, where ex-ante inequality, number of pure-strategy equilibria, and cost of coordination vary across treatments. We find that subjects coordinate more often on the efficient outcomes in the treatment with ex-ante inequality.

Rational parties enter into a contract if the agreement is mutually beneficial. However, after the contract is formed, changes to the costs and/or benefits of performance may render the original contract undesirable. In this paper, we carry out an incentivized experiment to study the effect of alternative remedies on the parties' ability to renegotiate their contractual obligations. After entering into a contract, experimental subjects observe symmetrical changes to the original costs and/or benefits, which create a misalignment of their performance vs. breach incentives. Renegotiation of the original contract would allow parties to realign their interests and to capture some additional surplus. Our experimental design compares the effects of damage and specific performance remedies on the parties' ability to renegotiate. Our results confirm Coase' (1960) irrelevance of remedies proposition, providing novel insights for the choice of contract remedies in the face of possible market shocks.

We study – empirically and theoretically – how restitution helps restore cooperation. After a breach, restitution strategies “propose” returning to cooperation by cooperating against defection, and condition actions on the balance between the cooperation given and received. We reanalyze experimental data from three classes of repeated games and find compelling empirical support for restitution strategies in general and for a strategy we named Payback in particular. Considering restitution strategies enables to resolve discrepancies between theory and experiments emerging from prior literature - such as the prevalent use of non-equilibrium strategies like Tit-for-tat - and questions the predominance of memory-one strategies.

We introduce a new app that collects 24-hour parental time diaries. To assess its validity, we leverage data from a sample of more than 500 parents with pre-school aged children. Our findings show that our tool is reliable and delivers high-quality data. By exploiting contextual information on the child's involvement and feelings during each activity performed with the parent, we construct new measures of parental investments that capture the quality of daily parent-child interactions. We analyse how these novel measures relate to alternative definitions and discuss the potential advantages of the adoption of our approach to time-use measurement in the rapidly growing field of research on the role of parental investments in child development.