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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
| By: | Nordblom, Katarina (Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies); Zamac, Jovan (Uppsala Center for Fiscal Studies) |
| Abstract: | This paper offers an explanation to why the general observation that elderly hold stronger moral attitudes than young ones may be an age rather than a cohort effect. We apply mechanisms from social psychology to explain how personal norms may evolve over the life cycle. We assume that people update their norms influenced by their own past behavior (e.g., cognitive dissonance) and/or by the attitudes of their peers (normative conformity). We apply the theory on actual norm distributions for young and old concerning tax evasion. Allowing for heterogeneous updating of norms where only those who identify with their network are actually conforming with it, while the others are only influenced by their own past behavior, we can explain the difference between young and old people’s moral values as an age effect through endogenous norm formation. |
| Keywords: | Social norms; Endogenous norms; Tax evasion; Cognitive dissonance; Self-signaling; Normative conformity |
| JEL: | H26 |
| Date: | 2011–08–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:uufswp:2011_010&r=soc |
| By: | Christophe Muller; Marc Vothknecht |
| Abstract: | This paper addresses the impact of violent conflict on social capital, as measured by citizen participation in community groups defined for four activity types: governance, social service, infrastructure development and risk-sharing. Combining household panel data from Indonesia with conflict event information, we find an overall decrease in citizen contributions in districts affected by group violence in the early post-Suharto transition period. However, participation in communities with a high degree of ethnic polarization is less strongly affected and even stimulated for local governance and risk-sharing activities. Moreover, individual engagement appears to be dependent on the involvement of other members from the own ethnic group, which points to emphases on bonding social networks in the presence of violence. Finally, in conflict regions, the wealthier households are more likely to engage into cooperative and infrastructure improvement activities, while they are dropping from security groups. On the contrary, the poorest households get more involved in social service activities and less in infrastructure groups. Our results illustrate the danger of generalizations when dealing with violence impact on community activities. We found a large variety of responses depending on the considered activity and its expected economic or social function. We also found large observed and unobserved individual heterogeneities of the effect of violent conflict on activity participation. Once an appropriate nomenclature of activities is used and intensive controls for observed and unobserved heterogeneity are performed, we found that some activities can actually be stimulated by conflict situations. In this respect, the ethnic configuration of society seems to be central in understanding this type of social capital building. |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mcn:rwpapr:48&r=soc |
| By: | Bert Hoffmann |
| Abstract: | In the debate over the role of civil society under authoritarian regimes, the spread of transna-tional web-based media obliges us to rethink the arenas in which the societal voice can be raised—and heard. Taking the case of state-socialist Cuba, a diachronic comparison analyzes civil society dynamics prior to the Internet—in the early to mid-1990s, and a decade later, after digital and web-based media made their way onto the island. The study finds that in the pre-Internet period, the focus was on behind-the-scenes struggles for associational autonomy within the state-socialist framework. A decade later, web-based communication technologies have supported the emergence of a new type of public sphere in which the civil society debate is marked by autonomous citizen action. While this defies the socialist regime’s design of state–society relations, its effect on democratization depends on the extent to which a web-based voice connects with off-line public debate and social action. |
| Date: | 2011–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gig:wpaper:156&r=soc |
| By: | Gilles, R.P.; Lazarova, E.A.; Ruys, P.H.M. (Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research) |
| Abstract: | We consider a network economy in which economic agents are connected within a structure of value-generating relationships. Agents are assumed to be able to participate in three types of economic activities: autarkic self-provision; binary matching interactions; and multi-person cooperative collaborations. We introduce two concepts of stability and provide sufficient and necessary conditions on the prevailing network structure for the existence of stable assignments, both in the absence of externalities from cooperation as well as in the presence of size-based externalities. We show that institutional elements such as the emergence of socioeconomic roles and organizations based on hierarchical leadership structures are necessary for establishing stability and as such support and promote stable economic development. |
| Keywords: | Cooperatives;Networks;Clubs;Network economies;Stable matchings. |
| JEL: | C72 D71 D85 |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:kubcen:2011084&r=soc |
| By: | Yamamura, Eiji |
| Abstract: | This study explored how social pressure related to parental preference for the sex of their children affects fertility. Pre-war and post-war generations were compared using individual level data previously collected in Japan in 2002. In the pre-war generation, if the first child was a daughter, the total number of children tended to increase not only when the mother preferred a son, but also when the mother did not have a preference for either gender. This tendency was not observed for the post-war generation. Results suggest that social pressure related to giving birth to a son led to high fertility in the pre-war generation; however, fertility was not influenced by social pressure in the post-war generation. This was because of a change in the influence of the traditional marriage system. |
| Keywords: | Fertility; son preference; social pressure; family structure |
| JEL: | J13 J12 J16 |
| Date: | 2011–08–18 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:32956&r=soc |
| By: | Gerhard Riener (GSBC-EIC - The Economics of Innovative Change, University of Jena); Simon Wiederhold (GSBC-EIC - The Economics of Innovative Change, University of Jena) |
| Abstract: | Controlling employees can have severe consequences in situations that are not fully contractible. However, the perception of control may be contingent on the nature of the relationship between principal and agent. We, therefore, propose a principal-agent model of control that takes into account social identity (in the sense of Akerlof and Kranton, 2000, 2005). From the model and previous literature, we conclude that a shared social identity between the principal and agent has both a cognitive, that is, belief-related, and a behavioral, that is, performance-related, dimension. We test these theoretical conjectures in a labor market experiment with perfect monitoring. Our ndings confirm that social identity has important implications for the agent's decision-making. First, agents who are socially close to the principal (in-group) perform, on average, more on behalf of the principal than socially distant (no-group) agents. Second, social identity shapes the agent's subjective expectations of the acceptable level of control. In-group agents expect to experience less control than no-group agents. Third, an agent's reaction to the monitoring level she eventually faces also depends on social identity. If the experienced level of control is lower than the expected control level, that is, the agent faces a positive sensation, the increase in performance is less pronounced for in-group agents than for no-group agents. In the case of a negative sensation, however, in-group agents react stronger than no-group agents. Put differently, being socially distant from the principal amplies the performance-enhancing effect of a positive control surprise and mitigates the detrimental performance effect of a negative surprise. |
| Keywords: | Control, Identity, Employee motivation, Principal-agent theory, Lab experiment |
| JEL: | C92 M54 |
| Date: | 2011–08–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2011-035&r=soc |
| By: | Alberto Bisin; Andrea Moro; Giorgio Topa |
| Abstract: | We study a general class of models with social interactions that might display multiple equilibria. We propose an estimation procedure for these models and evaluate its efficiency and computational feasibility relative to different approaches taken to the curse of dimensionality implied by the multiplicity. Using data on smoking among teenagers, we implement the proposed estimation procedure to understand how group interactions affect health-related choices. We find that interaction effects are strong both at the school level and at the smaller friends-network level. Multiplicity of equilibria is pervasive at the estimated parameter values, and equilibrium selection accounts for about 15 percent of the observed smoking behavior. Counterfactuals show that student interactions, surprisingly, reduce smoking by approximately 70 percent with respect to the equilibrium smoking that would occur without interactions. |
| Keywords: | Human behavior ; Social choice ; Health |
| Date: | 2011 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fednsr:504&r=soc |
| By: | Bolle, Friedel; Breitmoser, Yves; Otto, Philipp E. |
| Abstract: | This paper proposes two generalization of the core and evaluates them on experimental data of assignment games (workers and firms negotiate wages and matching). The generalizations proposed allow for social utility components (e.g. altruism) and random utility components (e.g. logistic perturbations). These generalizations are well-established in analyses of non-cooperative games, and they prove to be both descriptive and predictive in the assignment games analyzed here. The "logit core" allows us to define a "stochastically more stable" relation on the outcome set, which has intuitive implications, and it fits better than alternative approaches such as random behavior cores and regression modeling. |
| Keywords: | cooperative games; core; random utility; social preferences; laboratory experiment |
| JEL: | C71 C90 D64 |
| Date: | 2011–08–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:32918&r=soc |
| By: | Longhi, Simonetta |
| Abstract: | This paper combines individual data from the British Household Panel Survey and yearly population estimates for England to analyse the impact of cultural diversity on individual wages and on different aspects of job satisfaction. Do people living in more diverse areas have higher wages and job satisfaction after controlling for other observable characteristics? The results show that cultural diversity is positively associated with wages, but only when cross-section data are used. Panel data estimations show that there is no impact of diversity. Using instrumental variables to account for endogeneity also show that diversity has no impact. |
| Date: | 2011–08–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ese:iserwp:2011-19&r=soc |