|
on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Paola Giuliano |
| Abstract: | Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children and therefore persist until today. We review work on the historical origin of differences in female labor-force participation, fertility, education, marriage arrangements, competitive attitudes, domestic violence, and other forms of difference in gender norms. Most of the research illustrates that differences in cultural norms regarding gender roles emerge in response to specific historical situations, but tend to persist even after the historical conditions have changed. We also discuss the conditions under which gender norms either tend to be stable or change more quickly. |
| JEL: | N0 Z1 |
| Date: | 2017–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23635&r=evo |
| By: | Cagé, Julia; Rueda, Valeria |
| Abstract: | This article investigates the long-term historical impact of missionary activity on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, missionaries were the first to invest in modern medicine in a number of countries. On the other hand, the Christian influence on norms may have affected sexual beliefs and behaviors. We built a new geocoded dataset locating Protestant and Catholic missions in the early 20th century, as well as their health investments. We show that missionary presence has conflicting effects on HIV today. Regions close to historical mission stations exhibit higher HIV prevalence. This higher prevalence is robust to multiple specifications accounting for urbanization. Less knowledge about condom use is a likely channel. Moreover, among regions historically close to missionary settlements, proximity to a mission with a health investment is associated with lower HIV prevalence. Safer sexual behaviors around missions with health investments are a possible explanatory channel. |
| Keywords: | health investments; historical persistence; HIV/AIDS; missions; sexual behavior |
| JEL: | D72 N37 N77 O33 Z12 Z13 |
| Date: | 2017–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12192&r=evo |
| By: | Claudius Graebner (Institute for Institutional and Innovation Economics (iino), University of Bremen, Germany); Wolfram Elsner (Institute for Institutional and Innovation Economics, University of Bremen, Germany); Alexander Lascaux (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia) |
| Abstract: | We study the functioning of informal value transfer systems (IVTS) with the example of Hawala. More precisely, we use computational experiments to study the roles of generalized trust and social control for the stability and efficiency of IVTS. Previous literature was ambiguous with regard to: (i) how trust and control should be operationalized formally, (ii) which, if any of the two, carries a larger relevance for the functioning of IVTS, (iii) whether (and when) they relate to each other as substitutes or complements, and (iv) how they interact with a number of other environmental conditions. Our experiments suggest answers to all these questions. We show that both trust and control are necessary, but not sufficient to guarantee the functioning of Hawala, and that other relevant conditions, such as population size, interaction density, and forgiveness of the agents, provide important contexts. Aside from clarifying these questions, we provide a theoretically grounded operationalization of generalized trust and social control that is applicable to informal exchange systems in general. |
| Keywords: | Hawala, Computational experiment, Informal Value Transfer Systems, Institution, Social Control, Trust |
| Date: | 2017–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ico:wpaper:62&r=evo |
| By: | Laurens Cherchye; Thomas Demuynck; Bram De Rock; Frederic Vermeulen |
| Abstract: | We show that transferable utility has no nonparametrically testable implications for marriage stability in settings with a single consumption observation per house- hold and heterogeneous individual preferences across households. This completes the results of Cherchye, Demuynck, De Rock, and Vermeulen (2017), who characterized Pareto efficient household consumption under the assumption of marriage stability without transferable utility. First, we show that the nonparametric testable conditions established by these authors are not only necessary but also sufficient for rationalizability by a stable marriage matching. Next, we demonstrate that exactly the same testable implications hold with and without transferable utility between household members. We build on this last result to provide a primal and dual linear programming characterization of a stable matching allocation for the observational setting at hand. This provides an explicit specification of the marital surplus function rationalizing the observed matching behavior. |
| Keywords: | marriage stability; household consumption; nonparametric testable implications; transferable utility |
| JEL: | C14 D11 C78 |
| Date: | 2017–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eca:wpaper:2013/255694&r=evo |
| By: | Erik O. Kimbrough (Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University); Kevin Laughren (Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University); Roman M. Sheremeta (Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University and Economic Science Institute, Chapman University) |
| Abstract: | We review the main economic models of war and conflict. These models vary in details, but their implications are qualitatively consistent, highlighting key commonalities across a variety of conflict settings. Recent empirical literature, employing both laboratory and field data, in many cases confirms the basic implications of con- flict theory. However, this literature also presents important challenges to the way economists traditionally model conflict. We finish our review by suggesting ways to address these challenges |
| Keywords: | conflict, war, contest, all-pay auction, war of attrition |
| JEL: | D72 D74 F51 F52 F54 H56 N4 Q34 |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:17-13&r=evo |
| By: | Navarro-Martinez, Daniel; Loomes, Graham; Isoni, Andrea; Butler, David; Alaoui, Larbi |
| Abstract: | We build a satisficing model of probabilistic choice under risk which embeds Expected Utility Theory (EUT) into a boundedly rational deliberation process. The decision maker accumulates evidence for and against alternative options by repeatedly sampling from her underlying set of EU preferences until the evidence favouring one option satisfies her desired level of confidence. Notwithstanding its EUT core, the model produces patterns of behaviour that violate standard axioms, while at the same time capturing the systematic relationship between choice probabilities, response times and confidence judgments, which is beyond the scope of theories that do not take deliberation into account. |
| Keywords: | Expected utility; bounded rationality; deliberation; probabilistic choice; confidence; response times. |
| JEL: | D03 D81 |
| Date: | 2017–06–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:79893&r=evo |
| By: | Victor Stango; Joanne Yoong; Jonathan Zinman |
| Abstract: | Behavioral economics lacks empirical evidence on some foundational empirical questions. We adapt standard elicitation methods to measure multiple behavioral factors per person in a representative U.S. sample, along with financial condition, cognitive skills, financial literacy, classical preferences and demographics. Individually, B-factors are prevalent, distinct from other decision inputs, and correlate negatively with financial outcomes in richly-conditioned regressions. Conditioning further on other B-factors does not change the results, validating common practice of modeling B-factors separately. Corrections for low task/survey effort modestly strengthen the results. Our findings provide bedrock empirical foundations for behavioral economics, and offer methodological guidance for research designs. |
| JEL: | D03 D14 D8 D9 G02 |
| Date: | 2017–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23625&r=evo |
| By: | Andrew Dickens (Department of Economics, Brock University) |
| Abstract: | I document evidence of ethnic favoritism in a panel of 163 ethnolinguistic groups partitioned across 35 African countries. In contrast to previous studies, I construct a computerized lexicostatistical measure of linguistic similarity between each ethnic group and the national leader as a novel measure of ethnic proximity. I exploit the arbitrary placement of African political borders as a source of exogenous within-group variation, where the similarity of the same partitioned group varies over time according to the ethnolinguistic identity of the national leader on each side of the border. To quantify patronage at the group level, I isolate time variation in night light luminosity resulting from changes in the ethnolinguistic identity of a leader. Using a triple-difference estimator I find that a one standard deviation increase in linguistic similarity yields a 7.0 percent increase in luminosity, which corresponds to a 2.1 percent increase in group-level GDP per capita. I then use the continuity of linguistic similarity to show that favoritism exists among groups that are not coethnic to the leader, where the mean effect of non-coethnic similarity is one quarter the size of the coethnic effect. I corroborate this evidence using individual-level data and establish that it's where an individual lives and the attached ethnolinguistic identity that predicts favoritism, not the identity of the individual respondent. I relate these results to the literature on coalition building, and provide evidence that ethnicity is one of the guiding principles behind high-level government appointments. |
| Date: | 2017–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:brk:wpaper:1702&r=evo |