Abstract
We show that civic capital plays an important role when assessing the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing data of a sample of municipalities from the Italian region of Lombardy we provide two new pieces of evidence: (i) the share of vaccinated individuals is higher in municipalities with higher civic capital; (ii) conditional on the severity of the first-wave, municipalities with higher civic capital were less affected in the second wave. Our findings corroborate the idea of civic capital as an important behavioral determinant to curb the spread of Sars-Cov-2.