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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Stefano DellaVigna; John A. List; Ulrike Malmendier; Gautam Rao |
| Abstract: | We design a model-based field experiment to estimate the nature and magnitude of workers’ social preferences towards their employers. We hire 446 workers for a one-time task. Within worker, we vary (i) piece rates; (ii) whether the work has payoffs only for the worker, or also for the employer; and (iii) the return to the employer. We then introduce a surprise increase or decrease in pay (‘gifts’) from the employer. We find that workers have substantial baseline social preferences towards their employers, even in the absence of repeated-game incentives. Consistent with models of warm glow or social norms, but not of pure altruism, workers exert substantially more effort when their work is consequential to their employer, but are insensitive to the precise return to the employer. Turning to reciprocity, we find little evidence of a response to unexpected positive (or negative) gifts from the employer. Our structural estimates of the social preferences suggest that, if anything, positive reciprocity in response to monetary ‘gifts’ may be larger than negative reciprocity. We revisit the results of previous field experiments on gift exchange using our model and derive a one-parameter expression for the implied reciprocity in these experiments. |
| JEL: | C93 D64 |
| Date: | 2016–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22043&r=evo |
| By: | Stelios Michalopoulos; Louis Putterman; David Weil |
| Abstract: | We explore the role of an individual's historical lienage in determining economic status, holding constant his or her current location. This is complementary to the more common approachto studying how history shapes economic outcomes across locations. Motivated by a large literature in social sciences stressing the beneficial influence of agricultural transition on contemporary economic perfromance at the level of countries, we examine the relative status of descendants of agriculturalists vs. pastoralists. We match individual-level survey data with information on the historical lifeways of ancestors, focusing in Africa, where the transition away from such modes of production began only recently. Within enumeration areas and occupational groups, we find that individuals from ethnicities that derived a larger share of subsistence from agriculture in the pre-colonial era are today more educated and wealthy. A tentative exploration of channels suggests that differences in attitudes and beliefs as well as differential treatment by others, including less political power, may contribute to these divergent outcomes. |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bro:econwp:2016-1&r=evo |
| By: | Proto , Eugenio (Department of Economics, University of Warwick) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies a famous unsolved puzzle in quantitative social science. Why do some nations report such high levels of mental well-being? Denmark, for instance, regularly tops the league table of rich countries’ happiness; Britain and the US enter further down; some nations do unexpectedly poorly. The explanation for the longobserved ranking -- one that holds after adjustment for GDP and other socioeconomic variables -- is currently unknown. Using data on 131 countries, the paper cautiously explores a new approach. It documents three forms of evidence consistent with the hypothesis that some nations may have a genetic advantage in well-being. |
| Keywords: | Well-being, international, happiness, genes, 5-HTT, countries |
| JEL: | I30 I31 |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:warwec:1121&r=evo |
| By: | Dhillon, Amrita (Kings College and CAGE, University of Warwick); Krishnan, Pramila (University of Cambridge and CEPR); Patnam, Manasa (CREST-ENSAE); Perroni, Carlo (University of Warwick) |
| Abstract: | I construct a model of religion as an institution that provides community enforcement of contracts within families. Family altruism implies that family members cannot commit to reporting broken contracts to the community, so the community must monitor contract performance as well as in icting punishment. The community has less information than family members, and so community monitoring is ine cient. I provide evidence from a study of Amish institutions, including qualitative evidence from sociological accounts and quantitative evidence from a novel dataset covering nearly the entire Amish population of Holmes county, Ohio. I nd that 1) Amish households are not unitary, 2) the Amish community helps to support families by in icting punishments on wayward family members, 3) without the community Amish people have di culty committing to punishing family members, and 4) Amish community membership strengthens family ties, while otherwise similar religious communities in which there is less need for exchange between family members have rules that weaken family ties. My model has implications for understanding selection into religious practice and the persistence of culture. |
| Keywords: | Natural Resource Curse, Political Secession JEL Classification: |
| Date: | 2016 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:268&r=evo |
| By: | Drew Fudenberg; David K Levine |
| Date: | 2016–01–31 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cla:levarc:786969000000001307&r=evo |
| By: | Adrian Bruhin; Ernst Fehr; Daniel Schunk |
| Abstract: | There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others’ interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize heterogeneity across several dimensions of social preferences while still being able to predict behavior over time and across situations. We tackle this task with an experiment and a structural model of preferences that allows us to simultaneously estimate outcome-based and reciprocity-based social preferences. We find that nonselfish preferences are the rule rather than the exception. Neither at the level of the representative agent nor when we allow for several preference types do purely selfish types emerge. Instead, three temporally stable and qualitatively different other-regarding types emerge endogenously, i.e., without prespecifying assumptions about the characteristics of types. When ahead, all three types value others’ payoffs significantly more than when behind. The first type, which we denote as strongly altruistic type, is characterized by a relatively large weight on others’ payoffs - even when behind - and moderate levels of reciprocity. The second type, denoted as moderately altruistic type, also puts positive weight on others’ payoff, yet at a considerable lower level, and displays no positive reciprocity while the third type is behindness averse, i.e., puts a large negative weight on others’ payoffs when behind and behaves selfishly otherwise. We also find that there is an unambiguous and temporally stable assignment of individuals to types. Moreover, the three-type model substantially improves the (out-of-sample) predictions of individuals’ behavior across additional games while the information contained in subjectspecific parameter estimates leads to no or only minor additional predictive power. This suggests that a parsimonious model with three types captures the bulk of the predictive power contained in the preference estimates. |
| Keywords: | Social Preferences; Heterogeneity; Stability; Finite Mixture Models |
| JEL: | C49 C91 D03 |
| Date: | 2016–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lau:crdeep:16.01&r=evo |
| By: | Gani Aldashev; Catherine Guirkinger |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates how, under increasing land pressure during Russian settlement in Kazakh steppes in the late-XIXth century, family-based institutions and social structure of Kazakhs evolved to adapt to new economic conditions. Using a rich dataset constructed from Russian colonial expedition materials, we find that during the transition from nomadic pastoralism to a semi-sedentary pastoralist-agriculture system, the size of Kazakh extended families increased, those of communes and clans decreased, and that Kazakhs identified stronger with lower levels of genealogical clan system. Within families, property rights on land became more individualized, households became less likely to pool labor to farm, and wage labor contracts in agriculture became common. We discuss theoretical explanations for the observed patterns. |
| Date: | 2016–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eca:wpaper:2013/228105&r=evo |