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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
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Issue of 2021‒01‒25
ten papers chosen by Fabio Sabatini Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Lassen, Anne Sophie (Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School) |
| Abstract: | This paper shows that decisions regarding intra-household specializations are determined by gender norms rather than standard economic incentives. To test theoretical predictions of both the standard model of intra-household time allocation and the role of gender identity, social category and prescriptions, I use variation from a Danish parental leave reform. I find large effects among mothers and virtually unchanged behavior among fathers, irrespective of relative earnings in the household. This is consistent with the notion of pay-off from gender identity. Subsequently, I find peer effects among sisters and interpret this as reform-induced prescriptions regarding extensive leave for mothers. |
| Keywords: | Intra-household specialization; Gender norms; Parental leave; Peer effects |
| JEL: | D13 J13 J16 J18 J22 |
| Date: | 2021–01–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:cbsnow:2021_004&r=all |
| By: | El-Bialy, Nora; Fraile Aranda, Elisa; Nicklisch, Andreas; Saleh, Lamis; Voigt, Stefan |
| Abstract: | We report the results of an experiment on norm violation, specifically lying, in a repeatedly played mind game with Syrian refugees in Jordan and in Germany. We compare their behavior with Jordanians, Germans, and Syrians who still live in Syria. The average number of lies is amazingly similar - and low - across all five samples. However, the lying patterns of Syrian refugees are very different from non-refugee participants in Germany, Jordan, and Syria itself. After having lied once, refugee participants resort to a "never return"- pattern significantly more often than the nonrefugee participants. A closer look at the socio-demographic characteristics of our Syrian refugee participants reveals that lying is associated with higher age and gender, while a longer stay in the host country is positively correlated with a lower likelihood of reporting extreme numbers of matches. |
| Keywords: | Civil war,experimental economics,honesty,lying,psychological distress |
| JEL: | C93 D01 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ilewps:44&r=all |
| By: | Gay, Victor |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the pathways that underlie the diffusion of women's participation in the labor force across generations. I exploit a severe exogenous shock to the sex ratio, World War I in France, which generated a large inflow of women in the labor force after the war. I show that this shock to female labor transmitted to subsequent generations until today. Three mechanisms of intergenerational transmission account for this result: parental transmission, transmission through marriage, and transmission through local social interactions. Beyond behaviors, the war also permanently altered beliefs toward the role of women in the labor force. |
| Keywords: | Female labor force participation; World War I; Sex ratio; Intergenerational transmission; Gender norms |
| JEL: | J16 J22 N34 Z13 |
| Date: | 2021–01–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:125087&r=all |
| By: | Dániel Horn (Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies. 1097 Budapest, Tóth Kálmán utca 4.andDepartment of Economics, Corvinus University of Budapest. 1093 Budapest Fõvám tér 8.); Hubert János Kiss (Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies. 1097 Budapest, Tóth Kálmán utca 4.andDepartment of Economics, Corvinus University of Budapest. 1093 Budapest Fõvám tér 8.); Tünde Lénárd (SOFI, Stockholm University. SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden and Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies. 1097 Budapest, Tóth Kálmán utca 4.) |
| Abstract: | In this study, we estimate unadjusted and adjusted gender gap in time preference, risk attitudes, altruism, trust, trustworthiness, cooperation and competitiveness using data on 1088 high-school students from 53 classes. These data, collected by running incentivized experiments in Hungarian classrooms, are linked to an administrative data source on the students’ standardized test scores, grades and family background. We find that after taking into account class fixed effects, females are significantly more altruistic (both with classmates and schoolmates), but are less present-biased, less risk tolerant, less trusting, less trustworthy and less competitive than males. At the same time we do not observe significant gender differences in patience, time inconsistency and cooperation at the 5% significance level. We also show that these initial gender differences do not change even if we control for age, family background, cognitive skills and school grades in a regression framework. Moreover, the gender gap also remains in all but one of these preferences even if we control for the other preference domains, suggesting that only risk preferences are confounded by the other preferences, at least as the gender gap in these preferences is concerned. |
| Keywords: | adolescents, altruism, competitiveness, cooperation, dictator game, patience, present bias, public goods game, risk preferences, social preferences, time inconsistency, time preferences, trust, trustworthiness |
| JEL: | C80 C90 D91 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:2103&r=all |
| By: | Francesca Barigozzi (University of Bologna); Helmuth Cremer (TSE - Toulouse School of Economics - UT1 - Université Toulouse 1 Capitole - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement); Kerstin Roeder (University of Augsburg [Augsburg]) |
| Abstract: | We study long-term care (LTC) choices by families with mixed- or same-gender siblings. LTC can be provided either informally by children, or formally at home or in an institution. A social norm implies that daughters suffer a psychological cost when they provide less informal care than the average woman. Daughters have a lower wage than sons so that their opportunity cost of providing LTC is smaller. Families maximize a weighted sum of children's and parent's utilities. Because of the norm cost and the gender wage gap daughters will be the sole provider of informal LTC in mixed-siblings families. Sons provide LTC only if they have no female sibling. We show that the laissez-faire (LF) and the utilitarian first best (FB) differ for two reasons. First, because informal care imposes a negative externality on daughters via the social norm. Second, because the weights children and parents have in the family bargaining problem differ in general from their weights in social welfare. While these two problems are intertwined it appears that, unless children have a much larger weight than parents, too much informal care will be provided, especially by daughters, and that formal care should be subsidized. Previous papers suggest that LTC policies should "tolerate", as a side effect, some crowding out of informal care and that the latter should be encouraged. Our results suggest instead that, because of the existing social norm about gender roles in the family, optimal policies should "discourage" informal care through subsidies on formal LTC. |
| Keywords: | Social norms,Formal and informal,LTCDaughters,Sons |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03054704&r=all |
| By: | Eiji Yamamura |
| Abstract: | This study examines the influence of learning in a female teacher homeroom class in elementary school on pupils' voting behavior later in life, using independently collected individual-level data. Further, we evaluate its effect on preference for women's participation in the workplace in adulthood. Our study found that having a female teacher in the first year of school makes individuals more likely to vote for female candidates, and to prefer policy for female labor participation in adulthood. However, the effect is only observed among males, and not female pupils. These findings offer new evidence for the female socialization hypothesis. |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2101.08487&r=all |
| By: | Tsutomu Watanabe; Yabu Tomoyoshi |
| Abstract: | Japans government has taken a number of measures, including declaring a state of emergency, to combat the spread COVID-19. We examine the mechanisms through which the governments policies have led to changes in peoples behavior. Using smartphone location data, we construct a daily prefecture-level stay-at-home measure to identify the following two effects: (1) the effect that citizens refrained from going out in line with the governments request, and (2) the effect that government announcements reinforced awareness with regard to the seriousness of the pandemic and people voluntarily refrained from going out. Our main findings are as follows. First, the declaration of the state of emergency reduced the number of people leaving their homes by 8.6% through the first channel, which is of the same order of magnitude as the estimate by Goolsbee and Syverson (2020) for lockdowns in the United States. Second, a 1% increase in new infections in a prefecture reduces peoples outings in that prefecture by 0.026%. Third, the governments requests are responsible for about one quarter of the decrease in outings in Tokyo, while the remaining three quarters are the result of citizens obtaining new information through government announcements and the daily release of the number of infections. Our results suggest that what is necessary to contain the spread of COVID-19 is not strong, legally binding measures but the provision of appropriate information that encourages people to change their behavior. |
| Date: | 2020–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cnn:wpaper:20-007e&r=all |
| By: | David Adeabah (Legon, Ghana); Charles Andoh (Legon, Ghana); Simplice A. Asongu (Yaoundé, Cameroon); Isaac Akomea-Frimpong (Sydney University, Australia) |
| Abstract: | We examine the relationship between elections, political connections, and cash holdings in Ghanaian local assemblies. Using a panel dataset of 179local assemblies over a period 2012 to 2017, a panel regression and the generalized method of moments estimation techniques was employed for the analysis. We find that local assemblies hold less cash during election years, which suggests that election may be one of the potential factors to mitigate agency conflict in weak governance environment. Further, we demonstrate that local assemblies that have political connections hold less cash; however, political uncertainty makes these entities conducive to agency problems than their non-connected peers because they hold more cash. Additional analysis indicates that one year prior to elections, managerial conservatism kicks-in and leads managers to hold more cash in local assemblies that have political connections, which continues and becomes more pronounced in election years. Our results have implications for regulations on the cash management practices of local assemblies. |
| Keywords: | agency problem; cash holdings; generalized method of moments;panel regression; political connections |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:exs:wpaper:21/004&r=all |
| By: | Fazio, Andrea (Sapienza University of Rome); Reggiani, Tommaso G. (Cardiff University); Sabatini, Fabio (Sapienza University of Rome) |
| Abstract: | We study how the political cost of enforcing a lockdown in response to the COVID- 19 outbreak relates to citizens' propensity for altruistic punishment in Italy, the early epicenter of the pandemic. Approval for the government's management of the crisis decreases with the amount of the penalties that individuals would like to see enforced for lockdown violations. People supporting stronger punishment are more likely to consider the government's reaction to the pandemic as insufficient. However, after the establishment of tougher sanctions for risky behaviors, we observe a sudden flip in support for government. Higher amounts of the desired fines become associated with a higher probability of considering the government's policy response as too extreme, lower trust in government, and lower confidence in the truthfulness of the officially provided information. Lock-downs entail a political cost that helps explain why democracies may adopt epidemiologically suboptimal policies. |
| Keywords: | COVID-19, lockdown, law enforcement, altruistic punishment, incumbent support, trust in institutions, Italy |
| JEL: | D12 D83 I12 K40 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14032&r=all |
| By: | Curtis Atkisson; Monique Borgerhoff Mulder |
| Abstract: | Explaining why humans cooperate in anonymous contexts is a major goal of human behavioral ecology, cultural evolution, and related fields. What predicts cooperation in anonymous contexts is inconsistent across populations, levels of analysis, and games. For instance, market integration is a key predictor across ethnolinguistic groups but has inconsistent predictive power at the individual level. We adapt an idea from 19th-century sociology: people in societies with greater overlap in ties across domains among community members (Durkheim's "mechanical" solidarity) will cooperate more with their network partners and less in anonymous contexts than people in societies with less overlap ("organic" solidarity). This hypothesis, which can be tested at the individual and community level, assumes that these two types of societies differ in the importance of keeping existing relationships as opposed to recruiting new partners. Using multiplex networks, we test this idea by comparing cooperative tendencies in both anonymous experimental games and real-life communal labor tasks across 9 Makushi villages in Guyana that vary in the degree of within-village overlap. Average overlap in a village predicts both real-world cooperative and anonymous interactions in the predicted direction; individual overlap also has effects in the expected direction. These results reveal a consistent patterning of cooperative tendencies at both individual and local levels and contribute to the debate over the emergence of norms for cooperation among humans. Multiplex overlap can help us understand inconsistencies in previous studies of cooperation in anonymous contexts and is an unexplored dimension with explanatory power at multiple levels of analysis. |
| Date: | 2020–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2012.07669&r=all |