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Previous research indicates that historical institutions are crucial to the functioning and development of an economy. However, little is known about whether and how a historical institution affects current entrepreneurial activities. In ancient China, the Civil-service Examination (CSE), also known as keju , was the most important institution for selecting scholar-officials and had long-lasting effects. Using the variation in the historical success in keju across prefectures, this paper empirically examines the impact of the CSE on local corporate innovation. We find that the density of jinshi , which is the highest achievement in keju , is positively correlated with the innovation productivity of local firms as measured by patent applications and citations. To determine causality, we employ an instrumental variable and a quasi-experiment in early Qing period. Further tests suggest that the CSE promotes corporate innovation by fostering a forward-looking stance in firms, enhancing firms' human capital level, and increasing local social capital. Overall, our results indicate that the CSE has a real and long-lasting impact on today's firm innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Identity Theory proposed by Akerlof and Kranton (2000), we conceptualize the interactions between conservative outlook and female wellbeing through influencing gender norms. Conservative households often prefer women to stay home, which correlates to female employment and decision-making autonomy, affecting female physical mobility and female nutrition. Finding a suitable indicator for conservative outlook is difficult as we typically lack household-level ‘value survey’. In the fast modernizing context of rural Bangladesh, wearing burqa (veil) is often perceived as an indicator of socially conservative outlook. Using this insight, we process the data from the second wave of the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS) for 2015 to test the statistically robust association between household-level conservative outlook and gender-sensitive wellbeing indicators such as female employment, body mass index, and decision-making autonomy for the population of ever-married females aged 15–49 years old. After controlling for individual, household, and regional characteristics, and using sub-regional fixed effects, our findings suggest that living in conservative households is associated with lower probability of female employment. Females from conservative households are less likely to be in wage work or salaried jobs. The probability of being overweight is also higher for the females in conservative households as compared to non-conservative households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from two culturally distinct locales, Bangladesh and Ghana, we investigate whether men and women who report sole decision making in a particular domain experience stronger (or weaker) feelings of autonomous motivation—measured using the Relative Autonomy Index (RAI)—compared to those who report joint decision making. Used primarily in psychology, the RAI measures the extent to which an individual’s actions are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, where higher scores indicate greater autonomy. On aggregate, we find differences between men and women, and across countries, in the significance of association between the individual’s level of participation in decision-making and autonomy. In addition, we find heterogeneity in the strength of this association, depending on the domain (e.g., productive versus personal decisions) and whether partners agree on who normally makes decisions. These findings imply that details related to context and measurement matter for understanding individual decision-making power. We argue that all research using information on decision-making should include a careful analysis of men’s and women’s perceptions of decision making within the household, which may be useful for calibrating indicators to suit specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside classical determinants of education, there is a growing literature of social interactions in education which seems to be particularly concentrated in developed countries. This seems paradoxical as norms, culture and social capital appear to play a more important role in everyday life in Africa. We use a rich data set collected in Niakhar in rural Senegal, between 2001 and 2008 to study whether the school attendance of a child depends on the school attendance of other children in the same social group. Social groups are defined using geographical proximity and caste groups. While it is particularly difficult to empirically identify the impact of social group behavior, we take advantage of the temporal structure of the data to deal with a number of endogeneity issues. We rely moreover on different empirical strategies and placebo tests to argue that our results are not subject to confounding interpretations. Results show evidence of a strong and positive effect of social interactions on school attendance and the impact is greater for members of the highest caste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We put forward a computational multi-agent model capturing the impact of social network structure on individuals’ social trust, willingness to cooperate, social utility and economic performance. Social network structure is modeled as four distinct social capital dimensions: degree, centrality, bridging and bonding social capital. Model setup draws from socio-economic theory and empirical findings based on our novel survey dataset. Results include aggregate-level comparative statics and individual-level correlations. We find, inter alia , that societies that either are better connected, exhibit a lower frequency of local cliques, or have a smaller share of family-based cliques, record relatively better aggregate economic performance. As long as family ties are sufficiently valuable, there is a trade-off between aggregate social utility and economic performance, and small world networks are then socially optimal. We also find that in dense networks and trustful societies, there is a trade-off between individual social utility and economic performance; otherwise both outcomes are positively correlated in the cross section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature has found that individuals holding a greener self-image display higher levels of life satisfaction. We extend the single-country setting of that research to a transnational perspective and explore whether a relationship exists between green self-image (GSI) and life satisfaction (LS), both European-wide and at the national level. In order to explain differences in the GSI-LS relationship across nations and time, we study the role of pro-environmental values as a shared social norm. We find a significantly positive GSI-LS relationship in a pool of 35 European countries and in the majority of individual countries. In addition, we show that the well-being benefit of holding a green self-image is greater in societies that display more unanimity with respect to pro-environmental attitudes. Invoking the notion of social norms as shared agreements about what is appropriate and inappropriate, we take the latter finding to indicate that part of the well-being benefit from holding pro-environmental values derives from conformity to a social norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a boundedly rational model of opinion formation in which agents are subject to persuasion bias and communicate via finite languages. Agents are organized in a social network and repeatedly update their beliefs based on coarse messages about their neighbors’ beliefs. We show that agents do not reach a consensus; instead, their beliefs keep fluctuating forever if different languages are present in their neighborhoods. In particular, we recover the classical result that under persuasion bias agents typically reach a consensus if there is a unique language in society, while small perturbations lead to fluctuations. Our approach provides and formalizes a possible mechanism to account for theories according to which storytelling may generate excessive confidence swings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relates social mobility and social stratification to the structure of higher education. We develop an intergenerational model which shows that a two-tier higher education characterised by a division between elite and standard universities can be a key factor in generating permanent social stratification, social immobility and self-reproduction of the ‘elite’. In our approach, low mobility at the top is essentially explained by the differences in quality and in selection between elite and standard universities. A key result is that the wider the quality gap and the difference in per-student expenditures between elite and standard universities, the less social mobility. This is because a larger quality gap reinforces the weight of family backgrounds at the expense of personal ability. Our simulations show that this impact can be large. These findings provide theoretical bases for the differences in social mobility at the top observed between advanced countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aborigines have been present in Australia for around 65,000 years. This article investigates the sustainability characteristics of their economies and the contention that they were affluent. Contemporary tests of economic sustainability are applied. Hence attention is paid to the ability of their economic systems to promote the longevity of existence of Homo sapiens and their effectiveness in achieving intergenerational equity. Also, satisfaction of the three-pillar requirement for sustainability (namely that social, environmental and economic sustainability ought to be simultaneously satisfied) is taken into account. The view that traditional Aborigines were affluent is examined, and reasons are given why they were reluctant to acquire and accumulate material goods. Their failure to develop agriculture was consequential for their cultural and economic sustainability. This aspect is explored. Traditional Aboriginal socio-economic systems are found to be highly sustainable and may have resulted in affluence. Does this mean they were or are desirable? Difficulties in determining this are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using PISA test scores from 11,527 second-generation immigrants coming from 35 different countries of ancestry and living in 9 host countries, we find that the positive effects of country-of-ancestry gender social norms on girls’ math test scores relative to those of boys expand to other subjects (namely reading and science). We further find that gender norms shaped by beliefs on women's political empowerment and economic opportunity affect the gender gaps in test scores in general. Interestingly, gender norms do not seem to particularly influence math-related stereotypes, but instead, preferences for math. Finally, the evidence indicates that these findings are driven by cognitive skills, suggesting that social gender norms affect parent's expectations on girls’ academic knowledge relative to that of boys, but not on other attributes for success—such as non-cognitive skills. Taken together, our results highlight the relevance of general (as opposed to math-specific) gender stereotypes on the math gender gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effect of Protestantism versus Catholicism on the decision to become an entrepreneur in former Holy Roman Empire regions. Our research design exploits religious minorities' strong attachment to religious ethic and the predetermined historical determination of religious minorities' geographical distribution in the 1500s as a result of the “cuius regio eius religio” (whose realm, his religion) rule. We find that today Protestantism increases the probability to be an entrepreneur by around 5 percentage points with respect to Catholicism, a result that survives to a battery of robustness checks. We explicit the assumptions underlying the identification strategy and provide an extensive testing of their validity by making use of several European datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We augment standard models of cultural transmission with an explicit account of social learning, grounded in the information transmission literature. Youngsters observe the behavioral trait of a role model and form beliefs about the desirability of that trait. Adults have better information about each trait and have a paternalistic attitude toward their children. This makes them reluctant to adopt myopic behavior to avoid setting a negative example to their children. This signaling distortion increases in the influence parents have over their offspring. We extend the model to allow parental influence to depend on the population frequency of each trait and show that cultural complementarity does not imply convergence to a homogeneous population. We find empirical support for a positive relationship between parental influence and propensity to exert self-restraint by looking at alcohol and tobacco consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally assess the willingness to self-enforce restricted resource use by playing a common pool resource extraction game in four Tsimane’ indigenous communities in the Bolivian Amazon. We analyse the role of trust in participant's willingness to self-restrict resource use and collaborate with the authorities. Contrary to game behaviour in the industrialized world, we find that amongst the Tsimane’ extractions decrease across rounds. We also find that participants who trust a) non-Tsimane’ and b) the authorities extract less than other participants, but findings are not robust across rounds. Using the economic and anthropological literature, we interpret the findings arguing that trust in non-Tsimane’, which is strongly correlated with market access, may capture generalized trust levels and that people with higher levels of generalized trust interact more easily in non-personal transactions, like the situation presented in the game. As co-management also entails non-personal interactions with and trust in the authorities, our findings seem relevant for community-based conservation and co-management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we develop an original approach to assess the net benefits associated with a generic promotion program using an application to Bordeaux wines. The benefit is computed from the marginal impact of the program’s collective reputation on the individual reputation for sub-regions within Bordeaux. These different marginal impacts are estimated using detailed survey data about the image of Bordeaux wines in seven European countries. We find positive and significant spillover effects from the collective reputation (Bordeaux) that moreover increase with the reputation of the sub-region. These spillover effects, when significantly positive, vary from a minimum of 5% to a maximum of 15% of additional favorable quality opinions. We then calculate a measure of the average net benefits earned by producers from the regional promotion program in selected sub-regions within Bordeaux. Our results indicate that producers in some sub-regions are more likely to benefit from the promotion program and suggest that the current fee structure may not be properly aligned with market conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a rich Norwegian longitudinal data set, this study explores the effects of different social capital variables on the probability of cigarette smoking. There are four social capital variables available in two waves of our data set. Our results based on probit (and OLS) analyses (with municipality fixed-effects) show that the likelihood of smoking participation is negatively and significantly associated with social capital attributes, namely, community trust (–0.017), participation in organizational activities (–0.032), and cohabitation (–0.045). Significant negative associations were also observed in panel data, pooled OLS, and random effects models for community trust (–0.024; −0.010) and cohabitation (–0.040; −0.032). Fixed-effects models also showed significant negative effects for cohabitation (–0.018). Estimates of alternative instrumental variables (IV) based on recursive bivariate probit and IV-GMM models also confirmed negative and significant effects for three of its characteristics: cohabitation (–0.030; −0.046), community trust (–0.065; −0.075), and participation in organizational activities (–0.035; −0.046). The limitations of our conclusions are discussed, and the significance of our study for the field of social capital and health is described, along with suggested avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion rates using disaggregated data for Italian municipalities. We propose an original and innovative measure of social closure based on the diversity of surname distribution, which reflects a community's history of migration and inbreeding. We find that, all else equal, communities with a history of social closure have lower crime rates and higher tax evasion rates than more open communities. The effect of social closure is likely to be causal, it is relevant in magnitude, statistically significant, and robust to changes in the set of included controls, in the specific measures of dependent and independent variables, in the specification of the regression equation, and in the possible sample splits. Our findings are consistent with the idea that social closure strengthens social sanctions and social control, thus leading to more cooperative outcomes in local interactions, but it reduces cooperation on a larger scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do parties offer environmental policies in their political programs? While a number of papers examine the determinants of citizens’ pro-environmental behaviour, we know little about the extent to which political parties adjust their platform towards environmentalism. We investigate this process through data provided by the Manifesto Project Dataset (CMP) for 20 European countries over the period 1970-2008. Following the literature on public concern towards environment, we examine economic, environmental and political determinants. Our findings provide evidence that political parties’ environmental concern is strongly correlated with their political ideology and with country-level economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit the exogenous variation in peer groups generated by high school to college transitions to study the theoretical predictions of Battaglini et al.’s (2005) model of self-control in peer groups. We find evidence consistent with the two key predictions of this theory regarding the relationship between an agent's expected level of self-control and the size and composition of his or her social circles: (i) students embedded in social circles have more self-control than those who are alone and their self-control is increasing in the size of their social group; (ii) students’ self-control is, however, a non-monotonic hump-shaped function of the average self-control of their friends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether, how, and why individual education attainment depends on the educational attainment of schoolmates. Specifically, using longitudinal data on students and their friends in a nationally representative set of US schools, we consider the influence of different types of peers on educational outcomes. We find that there are strong and persistent peer effects in education, but peers tend to be influential in the long run only when their friendships last more than a year. This evidence is consistent with a network model in which convergence of preferences and the emergence of social norms among peers require long-term interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tolerance is a distinguishing feature of Western culture. Still, it varies between and within countries, as well as over time, and irrespective of whether one values it for its own sake or for its beneficial consequences, it becomes important to identify its determinants. In this study, we investigate whether the character of economic policy plays a role, by looking at the effect of changes in economic freedom (i.e., lower government expenditures, lower and more general taxes and more modest regulation) on tolerance in one of the most market-oriented countries, the United States. In comparing U.S. states, we find that an increase in the willingness to let atheists, homosexuals and communists speak, keep books in libraries and teach college students is, overall, positively related to preceding increases in economic freedom, more specifically in the form of more general taxes. We suggest, as one explanation, that a discriminatory tax system, which is susceptible to the influence of special interests and which treats people differently, gives rise to feelings of tension and conflict. In contrast, the positive association for tolerance towards racists only applies to speech and books, not to teaching, which may indicate that when it comes to educating the young, (in)tolerant attitudes towards racists are more fixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research uses predicted genetic diversity unadjusted for the ancestral composition of current populations, as a plausible source of exogenous variations for indicators of economic institutions. While genetic diversity has a robust, concave and significant effect on economic institutions, reduced-form regressions and numerous falsification tests ostensibly suggest that genetic diversity affects development only via indices of multidimensional measures of economic institutions. Second-stage results indicate that allowing for cognitive skills, latitude and ethno-diversity, economic institutions exert a positive and strongly statistically significant effect on development. These findings are robust to the inclusion of deep and proximate growth determinants, different measures of geography, institutions, and horse races between cognitive skills and economic freedom, as well as to the use of different estimators. Human capital, gauged by cognitive skills, in most specifications is not significant in the second stage; however, it is positive and a strong significant predictor of economic institutions in the first stage. The empirical evidence unveiled in this study lends credence to the primacy of economic institutions hypothesis to ignite long-term growth and highlights the crucial role of human capital in enhancing economic institutional quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship among bullying, individual's identity, and school performance in Chile. The results indicate that being a bully or a bully-victim increases the probability of being a low performing student. For the case of victims, our results suggest a heterogeneity according students’ ability, decreasing academic achievement for students with below average ability, but increasing it for very high achieving students. We also found that students claiming to belong to a subculture characterized by a defiant attitude towards authority have lower academic achievement. Our results support anti-bullying policies and those attempting to promote student's identities associated with higher academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local public transportation except in metropolitan areas in Japan faces operating difficulties due to business deficits. In recent years, central and local governments have taken social benefits into account to support local public transportation, but social benefits calculated in their cost-benefit analyses seem to be insufficient to evaluate them. Especially since the great earthquake in 2011, Japanese people have begun to rethink the importance of network and trust in neighborhoods, which can be called as ‘social capital,’ based on mobility. Therefore, focusing on ‘social capital,’ this paper tries to find the role of local public transportation beyond social benefits. Specifically, it makes an empirical analysis on the relationship between the indexes of ‘social capital’ and local bus services using cross section data. As a result, network and participation indexes standing for ‘social capital’ in each prefecture positively correlate with the level of local bus services. Also, according to our survey research in Toyama, introduction of a new LRT line is likely to have considerably changed the activities of residents along the line and has tended to promote more opportunities to come into contact with others than before. Those studies shed light on the role of public transportation from the standpoint of ‘social capital.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there any return to education in criminal activities? This paper is one of the first to investigate whether education has not only a positive impact on legitimate, but also on illegitimate activities. We use as a case study one of the longest running criminal corporations in history: the Italian-American mafia. Its most successful members were capable businessmen, orchestrating crimes that required abilities that might be learned at school: extracting the optimal rent when setting up a racket, weighting interests against default risk when starting a loan sharking business or organizing supply chains, logistics and distribution when setting up a drug dealing system. We address this question by comparing mobsters to a variety of samples drawn from the United States 1940 Population Census, including a sample of their closest (non-mobster) neighbors. We document that mobsters have one year less education than their neighbors on average. We find that mobsters have significant returns to education of 7.5–8.5% , which is only slightly smaller than their neighbors and 2–5 percentage points smaller than for U.S.-born men or male citizens. Mobster returns were consistently about twice as large as a sample of Italian immigrants or immigrants from all origin countries. Within that, those charged with complex crimes including embezzlement and bookmaking have the highest returns. We conclude that private returns to education exist even in the illegal activities characterized by a certain degree of complexity as in the case of organized crime in mid-twentieth century United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We interview both parents and their children enrolled in six primary schools in the district of Treviso (Italy). We study the structural differences between the children network of friends reported by children and the one elicited asking their parents. We find that the parent-reported network has a bias that is consistent with the following explanation: parents expect peer effects on school achievement to be stronger than what they really are. Thus, parents of low-performing students report their children to be friends of high-performing students. Our numerical simulations indicate that when this bias is combined with a bias on how some children target friends, then there is a multiplier effect on the expected school achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider how individuals allocate their time between church attendance (and other religious activities) and secular leisure activities. Moreover, individuals use a cognitive style, which is either intuitive-believing or reflective-analytical. I assume that the full benefit from religious activities is achieved by intuitive believers. The model predicts that, ceteris paribus, wealthier individuals and individuals with higher cognitive ability are more likely to abandon the intuitive-believing cognitive style. They may continue to attend church but do so less frequently than intuitive believers. In general equilibrium, there exists a locally stable steady state where believing and frequent church attendance is widespread across the social strata. A sufficiently large negative shock (e.g. the Enlightenment, repeal of Sunday shopping laws), however, initiates the gradual secularization of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how group size affects cooperation in an infinitely repeated n -player Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game. In each repetition of the game, groups of size n ≤ M are randomly and anonymously matched from a fixed population of size M to play the n -player PD stage game. We provide conditions for which the contagious strategy ( Kandori, 1992 ) sustains a social norm of cooperation among all M players. Our main finding is that if agents are sufficiently patient, a social norm of society-wide cooperation becomes easier to sustain under the contagious strategy as n increases toward M . In an experiment where the population size M is fixed and conditions identified by our theoretical analysis hold, we find strong evidence that cooperation rates are higher with larger group sizes than with smaller group sizes in treatments where each subject interacts with M − 1 robot players who follow the contagious strategy. When the number of human subjects increases in the population, the cooperation rates decrease significantly, indicating that it is the strategic uncertainty among the human subjects that hinders cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observers who are angered by rule violations and punish violators often play a critical role in enforcement. Hence a key question is: when will noncompliance provoke anger, and when will it be excused? This paper develops a theory of rule compliance as the outcome of a two-person Bayesian game. The core of the model is its description of what constitutes an excuse. Noncompliance is excused when a “reasonable person” in similar circumstances would also have failed to comply. Phenomena explained include the role of “legitimacy” in enforcement; corruption traps; graduated sanctions for repeat offenders; and tolerance of self-interestedness in markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to broaden economic discourse by importing insights into human behavior not just from psychology, but also from sociology and anthropology. Whereas in standard economics the concept of the decision-maker is the rational actor , and in early work in behavioral economics it is the quasi-rational actor influenced by the context of the moment of decision, in some recent work in behavioral economics, the decision-maker could be called the enculturated actor . This actor's preferences, perception, and cognition are subject to two deep social influences: (a) the social contexts to which he has become exposed and, especially, accustomed; and (b) the cultural mental models —including categories, identities, narratives, and worldviews—that he uses to process information. The paper traces how these factors shape behavior through the endogenous determination of preferences and the lenses through which individuals see the world—their perception and interpretation of situations. The paper offers a tentative taxonomy of the social determinants of behavior and describes the results of controlled and natural experiments that only a broader view of these determinants can plausibly explain. The perspective suggests more realistic models of human behavior for explaining outcomes and designing policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do customary courts strategically adapt arbitration outcomes if they face increased competition by the formal law? Through a lab-in-field experiment with villagers and real customary judges in rural Ethiopia, we show that post-arbitration payouts to agents disfavored by the customary system are downwardly biased. Introducing a costly formal law reduces these biases and draws the decisions of customary judges significantly closer to the law. At the same time agents advantaged by the law do not exploit their increased bargaining power. Instead, they make offers that are less advantageous to themselves and, in equilibrium, only a fraction of them make direct use of the formal law. Our results suggest that local customary dispute resolution institutions may have a role to play in shifting preexisting customs toward a desired outcome. In areas where formal legal institutions have limited outreach, the effects of increased competition between formal law and customary legal institutions may rise from changes in the latter, rather than from plaintiffs seeking justice under the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of social trust on foreign institutional investors’ equity holdings in listed Chinese firms from 2005 to 2011. We find that social trust embedded in the regional environment is an important factor for the investment decisions of foreign institutional investors. We also find that the proportion and likelihood of foreign ownership increases with the level of social trust. The results support the notion that social trust and trust-related information help mitigate informational barriers in international equity investments. Our results are robust to alternative measures of social trust and a range of model specifications, including instrumental variable estimation. We document that the effects of social trust on foreign ownership diminishes in the presence of organizational learning, better formal institutional development, conservative financial reporting, and asset transparency. We also show that foreign institutional investors from countries with a common law origin are more likely to incorporate trust-related information in their investment decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most rural and peripheral regions in Sweden suffer from an outmigration of young adults and particularly young women are over-represented in this outmigration. The outmigration of young adults in general and young women in particular is headed for the major towns in southern Sweden and the capital city Stockholm. This sex-biased out-migration has been on-going for more than 40 years for some rural regions in Sweden. This paper aims at explaining the outmigration and return migration of women 18–34 to and from the peripheral region Västernorrland in Northern Sweden. A qualitative method will be used in the analysis in this study. The empirical material consists of expert interviews and interviews with young women leaving Västernorrland, returning to Västernorrland or moving in without any prior connection to the region. The conventional driving forces for out-migration of young women are connected to studies and moving to more female-friendly labour markets. The findings in this study suggest that bad infrastructure and general service are factors causing out-migration and repel women to return. Furthermore, young women with weak social networks in the region appear more willing to leave and the ‘macho culture’ in the region appears a push-factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that poorer people have worse health than the better-off and, more controversially, that income inequality harms health. But causal interpretations suffer from endogeneity. We addressed the gap by using a randomized control trial among a society of forager-farmers in the Bolivian Amazon. Treatments included one-time unconditional income transfers (T 1 ) to all households and (T 2 ) only to the poorest 20% of households, with other villages as controls. We assessed the effects of income inequality, absolute income, and spillovers within villages on self-reported health, objective indicators of health and nutrition, and adults' substance consumption. Most effects came from relative income. Targeted transfers increased the perceived stress of participants in better-off households. Evidence suggests increased work efforts among better-off households when the lot of the poor improved, possibly due to a preference for rank preservation. The study points to new paths by which inequality might affect health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a model of public good contributions as signals of the contributor's trustworthiness, and test the predictions of this model using data on volunteering in small Swiss towns. Unlike most previous work, we avoid assuming that agents simply have a taste for prestige, and instead model the material value of a prosocial reputation. The model predicts that, specifically in small communities with low population turnover where reputation is important, volunteering will decline with age (as the end of the agent's reputational game approaches). In communities with higher turnover, this effect will not be observed. Our results support this hypothesis. The model also implies that the presence of a public good which must be provided voluntarily enhances trust in bilateral market and non-market interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveillance of age at menarche could provide useful information on the impact of changing environmental conditions on child health. Nevertheless, nationally representative data are exceedingly rare. The aim of this study was to examine trends and sociodemographic correlates of age at menarche of Colombian girls. The study sample included 15,441 girls born between 1992 and 2000 who participated in the Colombian National Nutrition Survey of 2010. We estimated median menarcheal age using Kaplan–Meier time-to-event analyses. Hazard ratios with 95% confidence intervals were estimated with Cox regression models. The median age at menarche was 12.6 years. There was an estimated decline of 0.54 years/decade ( P < 0.001) over the birth years; this decline was only observed among girls from urban areas, and was more pronounced among girls from wealthier versus poorer families. Child height and BMI, maternal BMI and education, and family wealth were each inversely associated with menarcheal age whereas food insecurity and number of children in the household were positively associated with age at menarche. In conclusion, a negative trend in age at menarche is ongoing in Colombia, especially in groups most likely to benefit from socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates opinion dynamics and social influence in directed communication networks. We study the theoretical properties of a boundedly rational model of opinion formation in which individuals aggregate the information they receive from their neighbors by using weights that are a function of neighbors’ indegree. We then present the results of a laboratory experiment explicitly designed to test the causal effect of indegree on social influence. We find that the social influence of an agent is positively affected by the number of individuals she listens to. When forming their opinions, agents take into account the structure of their communication network, although only to a limited extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have important social components and, therefore, can have an effect on social capital. In 2007, we conducted a field experiment with 1451 subjects in Cartagena, Colombia. We interpret the behavior in the game as a measure of what in the literature has been called social capital. We played the game in two similar and adjacent neighborhoods. The ‘treatment’ neighborhood, Pozón , had been targeted for over 2 years by a CCT program, Familias en Acción ; the ‘control’ neighborhood, Ciénaga , had not. In 2008, with the program being implemented in both neighborhoods, we played the same public goods game, and were therefore able to implement a difference in differences strategy to estimate the impact of the CCT on our measure of social capital. In 2007, the level of cooperation we observed in the treatment neighborhood was considerably higher than that in the control one. Although similar in many dimensions, the two groups turned out to be significantly different in some observable variables; the positive result was robust to controls for these differences. In 2008, we found that the level of cooperation was statistically identical across the two neighborhoods, and similar to the levels observed in 2007 in the treatment one. We conclude that the CCT program did improve cooperation. In analyzing the effect of the CCT on cooperation we also look at other (individual and group) determinants of individual behavior in the game, and we compare our measure based on behavior in the game to more traditional measures of social capital used in the literature that we collected in a context-specific survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than one billion people in the world have some kind of disability. Apart from the obvious physical challenges facing disabled people, there may also be psychological barriers that make it difficult for them to integrate in society and prosper. These challenges may be particularly difficult in developing countries, where disabled individuals are often marginalized. The present paper presents experimental evidence on the effect of social identity on disabled secondary school students in urban and rural Uganda. In the rural setting, we find a negative effect of social identity on confidence, but, somewhat surprisingly, in the urban setting we find a positive effect on confidence. This evidence suggests that social identities are shaped by the local environment and are not necessarily in line with commonly held stereotypes, a finding that could have important implications for the design of policies aimed at improving the lives of the disabled. We find only limited evidence of social identity affecting performance or preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evil eye belief is a widespread superstition according to which people can cause harm by a mere envious glance at coveted objects or their owners. This paper argues that such belief originated and persisted as a useful heuristic under conditions in which envy was likely to trigger destructive behavior and the avoidance of other people's envy, effectively prescribed by the evil eye belief, was a proper response to that threat. We hypothesize that in weakly institutionalized societies wealth differentiation and vulnerability of productive assets were the key factors enabling envy-induced destructive behavior and contributing to the emergence and spread of the evil eye belief as a cultural defense mechanism. Evidence from small-scale preindustrial societies shows that there is indeed a robust positive association between the incidence of the belief and measures of wealth inequality, controlling for potential confounding factors such as patterns of spatial and cross-cultural diffusion and various dimensions of early economic development. Furthermore, the evil eye belief is more prevalent in agro-pastoral societies that tend to sustain higher levels of inequality and where vulnerable material wealth plays a dominant role in the subsistence economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We design a laboratory experiment to test for image motives in a setting where decisions signal intelligence to a social audience. Money-maximizing behavior in the experiment sorts subjects by academic ability, as measured by performance on verbal analogy questions, across two levels of question difficulty. Sorting behavior is publicly revealed in our “audience” treatment, facilitating social signaling. In the “intrinsic only” treatment, the signaling mechanism was explained but decisions were kept private. In the control, there was no discussion of the signaling mechanism and all decisions were private. We find that intrinsic only subjects were significantly more likely to choose the high-type action than the control. In comparison, subjects were significantly less likely to choose the signal in the audience treatment, when doing so was publicly observed. The effects are more pronounced in males. The results suggest that social observation can demotivate individuals when decisions signal intelligence, despite evidence that the underlying trait was privately considered desirable. Audience effects have a less predictable impact on behavior in this setting as compared to the near universally positive findings from the altruism and trust literature. Our experimental design can be easily adapted to study image motives in a broad set of environments using revealed preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing evidence shows that decision makers’ social ties to internal co-workers can lead to reduced firm performance. In this article, we show that decision makers’ social ties to external transaction partners can also hurt firm performance. Specifically, we use 34 years of data from the National Basketball Association and study the relationship between a team's winning percentage and its use of players that the manager acquired through social ties to former employers in the industry. We find that teams with “tie-hired-players” underperform teams without tie-hired-players by 5 percent. This effect is large enough to change the composition of teams that qualify for the playoffs. Importantly, we show that adverse selection of managers and teams into the use of tie-hiring procedures cannot fully explain this finding. Additional evidence suggests instead that managers deliberately trade-off private, tie-related benefits against team performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents evidence that generalized trust promotes health. Children of immigrants in a broad set of European countries with ancestry from across the world are studied. Individuals are examined within country of residence using variation in trust across countries of ancestry. The approach addresses reverse causality and concerns that the trust measure picks up institutional factors in the individual's contextual setting. There is a significant positive estimate of ancestral trust in explaining self-assessed health. The finding is robust to accounting for individual, parental, and extensive ancestral country characteristics. Individuals with higher ancestral trust are also less likely to be hampered by health problems in their daily life, providing evidence of trust influencing real life outcomes. Individuals with high trust feel and act healthier, enabling a more productive life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the intergenerational transmission of trust by studying children of immigrants in 29 European countries with ancestry in 87 nations. There is significant transmission of trust on the mother's side, and the transmission is significantly stronger than on the father's side. The transmission is stronger in high trust countries. Building trust in high trust environments is a process lasting generations. Intriguingly, trust transmission is strong also in low trust birth countries if ancestral trust is very high. There is persistence of very high trust in low trusting environments through cultural transmission in the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Develop a unified model embedding different behavioral mechanisms of social interactions. [•] Design a statistical model selection test to discriminate between them. [•] Find that there are strong social multiplier effects in sport activities. [•] For education, social norms matter the most. [•] For education, group-based policies are more effective. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] We use a natural experiment with college roommates to estimate peer effects. [•] Peer effects on binge drinking are robust, regardless of gender and prior drinking. [•] There is tentative evidence that peer effects on smoking are stronger among men. [•] There is little evidence of peer effects on illicit drug use, gambling, and sexual activity. [•] Similarity in pre-existing risky behaviors predicts the closeness of friendships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper proposes a theory for the social evolution of obesity. It considers a society in which individuals experience utility from consumption of food and non-food, the state of their health, and the evaluation of their appearance by others. The theory explains under which conditions poor persons are more prone to be overweight although eating is expensive and it shows how obesity occurs as a social phenomenon such that body mass continues to rise long after the initial cause (e.g. a lower price of food) is gone. The paper investigates the determinants of a steady state at which the median person is overweight and how an originally lean society arrives at such a steady state. Extensions of the theory towards dietary choice and the possibility to exercise in order to lose weight demonstrate robustness of the basic mechanism and provide further interesting results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] We use pseudo-panel data to test the effect of social capital on entrepreneurship. [•] Trust both in strangers and in public institutions increases entrepreneurship. [•] Parent's emphasizing achievement relative to relations increases entrepreneurship. [•] Social norms represented by honesty facilitate entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Obese white female adolescents are less likely to – (a) have been in a romantic relationship; (b) to have sexual intercourse and (c) to experience intimate relationship. [•] There are no systematic differences in relationship experiences and sexual behaviors between obese and non-obese black female adolescents. [•] These findings highlight the consequences of obesity and racial differences in appearance norms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: While the beneficial effects of social trust on economic performance have been largely recognized, we analyze whether these effects can be generalized for economies at different stages of economic development. Contrary to previous studies on this issue based on average effects (mostly considering ordinary least squares estimations), we follow a quantile regression approach that enables us to capture heterogeneous effects of trust for different development levels. By considering data for 80 countries, and using trust indicators from five different waves of the World Values Survey (WVS), our results by quantile indicate that trust is not relevant for the poorest economies, showing the existence of a social poverty trap. In addition, results suggest that the impact of trust on income decreases as an economy becomes richer. This would suggest not only that trust benefits cannot be generalized for all countries, as some previous studies have proposed, but also that the extent of its implications are heavily dependent on the level of development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The objective of the first part of this study is to confirm Alexis de Tocqueville's assertion that “Even the most favorable geographic locations and the best laws cannot maintain a constitution in despite of mores.” A synthetic index of progressive social values taken from the World Values Survey turns out to be a robust predictor of GDP per capita levels and of governance performance, controlling for resource endowment and political institutions. The second part of the study tests the 25-factor typology of progress-prone and progress-resistant cultures of the Cultural Change Institute, adapting the same two regression models. The findings reveal the high productivity of a population shift from a progress-resistant to a progress-prone value, belief, or attitude. The concluding remarks recommend ways that these findings may be used as guidelines to promote economic and social development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]