Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/331368 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
Quaderni - Working Paper DSE No. 1209
Publisher: 
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche (DSE), 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.
Subjects: 
Economics of Obituaries
Status Signaling
Social Networks
Media and News
COVID-19
Text Analysis
JEL: 
A10
A13
D71
D85
D91
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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