nep-evo 2014-06-28 papers

on Evolutionary Economics

Issue of 2014‒06‒28
two papers chosen by
Matthew Baker
City University of New York

Ode to the sea: Workplace Organizations and Norms of Cooperation By Uri Gneezy; Andreas Leibbrandt; John A. List
It's Raining Men! Hallelujah? By Pauline Grosjean; Rose Khattar

Ode to the sea: Workplace Organizations and Norms of Cooperation

By:	Uri Gneezy; Andreas Leibbrandt; John A. List
Abstract:	The functioning and well-being of any society and organization critically hinges on norms of cooperation that regulate social activities. Empirical evidence on how such norms emerge and in which environments they thrive remains a clear void in the literature. To provide an initial set of insights, we overlay a set of field experiments in a natural setting. Our approach is to compare behavior in Brazilian fishermen societies that differ along one major dimension: the workplace organization. In one society (located by the sea) fishermen are forced to work in groups whereas in the adjacent society (located on a lake) fishing is inherently an individual activity. We report sharp evidence that the sea fishermen trust and cooperate more and have greater ability to coordinate group actions than their lake fishermen counterparts. These findings are consistent with the argument that people internalize social norms that emerge from specific needs and support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role in the proliferation of pro-social behaviors.
JEL:	C93 J0
Date:	2014–06
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20234&r=evo

It's Raining Men! Hallelujah?

By:	Pauline Grosjean (School of Economics, Australian School of Business, the University of New South Wales); Rose Khattar (School of Economics, Australian School of Business, the University of New South Wales)
Abstract:	We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th and 19th century. In areas with higher gender imbalance, women historically married more, worked less, and were less likely to occupy high-rank occupations. Today, people living in those areas have more conservative attitudes towards women working and women are still less likely to have high-ranking occupations. We document the role of vertical cultural transmission and of homogamy in the marriage market in sustaining cultural persistence. Conservative gender norms may have been beneficial historically, but are no longer necessarily so. Historical gender imbalance is associated with an aggregate income loss estimated at $800 per year, per person. Our results are robust to a wide array of geographic, historical and present-day controls, including migration and state fixed effects, and to instrumenting the overall sex ratio by the sex ratio among convicts.
Keywords:	Culture, gender roles, sex ratio, natural experiment, Australia
JEL:	I31 N37 J16
Date:	2014–06
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:swe:wpaper:2014-29&r=evo

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