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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
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Issue of 2015‒12‒12
seven papers chosen by Fabio Sabatini Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Ana Mauleon (CEREC, Saint-Louis University ?Brussels and CORE, University of Louvain, Belgium); Nils Roehl (University of Paderborn and Bielefeld University, Germany); Vincent Vannetelbosch (CORE, University of Louvain and CEREC, Saint-Louis University ?Brussels, Belgium) |
| Abstract: | The objective of the paper is to analyze the formation of social networks where individuals are allowed to engage in several groups at the same time. These group structures are interpreted here as social networks. Each group is supposed to have specific rules or constitutions governing which members may join or leave it. Given these constitutions, we consider a social network to be stable if no group is modified any more. We provide requirements on constitutions and players’ preferences under which stable social networks are induced for sure. Furthermore, by embedding many-to-many matchings into our setting, we apply our model to job markets with labor unions. To some extent the unions may provide job guarantees and, therefore, have influence on the stability of the job market. |
| Keywords: | Social Networks, Constitutions, Stability, Many-to-Many Matchings |
| JEL: | C72 C78 D85 |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2015.59&r=soc |
| By: | Hasan, Iftekhar (Fordham University and Bank of Finland); Hoi, Chun-Keung (Stan) (Saunders College of Business, Rochester Institute of Technology); Wu, Qiang (Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute); Zhang , Hao (Saunders College of Business, Rochester Institute of Technology) |
| Abstract: | We find that firms headquartered in U.S. counties with higher levels of social capital incur lower bank loan spreads. This finding is robust to using organ donation as an alternative social-capital measure and incremental to the effects of religiosity, corporate social responsibility, and tax avoidance. We identify the causal relation using companies with a social-capital-changing headquarter relocation. We also find that high-social-capital firms face loosened nonprice loan terms, incur lower at-issue bond spreads, and prefer bonds over loans. We conclude that debt holders perceive social capital as providing environmental pressure constraining opportunistic firm behaviors in debt contracting. |
| Keywords: | social capital; cooperative norm; moral hazard; cost of bank loans; public bonds |
| JEL: | G21 G32 Z13 |
| Date: | 2015–11–20 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:bofrdp:2015_021&r=soc |
| By: | Karl Aiginger; Susanne Bärenthaler-Sieber; Johanna Vogel |
| Abstract: | This paper aims to redefine the term competitiveness to enhance its usefulness for the evaluation of country performance and for policy conclusions. We attempt to establish a definition that is adequate if economic policy strives for a new growth path that is more dynamic, socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable. We tentatively apply the proposed definition to evaluate the "competitiveness" of EU member states as well as to compare Europe's "competitiveness" with that of the US (and, where possible, with Switzerland, Japan and China). In the first part of the paper, we examine the evolution of the concept from a focus on "inputs" at the firm level (price or cost competitiveness) to economic structure and capabilities at the country level and finally to "outcome" competitiveness, where outcomes are defined in a broad sense and in the context of the WWWforEurope project. We propose to define competitiveness as the "ability of a country (region, location) to deliver the beyond-GDP goals for its citizens". In the second part of the paper, the performance of the EU-27 countries is assessed along the dimensions described above. We begin with price competitiveness and then proceed to economic structure and countries’ capabilities regarding innovation, education, the social system, institutions and environmental ambition. We conclude with outcome competitiveness in terms of economic, social and ecological outcomes. Overall, we compile a database of 68 indicators that describe these different aspects of competitiveness. In the third part of the paper, we investigate empirically the relationship between "outcome" and "input" competitiveness for the EU-27 using panel data analysis for the period from 2000 to 2010. We construct a composite indicator for outcome competitiveness consisting of income, social and ecological pillars, following the beyond-GDP literature. This measure is then econometrically related to composite indicators of the three groups of input indicators: price competitiveness, economic structure, and capabilities. The results of panel OLS regressions suggest that both economic structure and capabilities on aggregate are positively related to our measure of outcome competitiveness, while a negative relationship is found for the wage component of price competitiveness. Among the different dimensions of capabilities, ecological preferences and – less robustly – institutions appear to be positively associated with outcome competitiveness. |
| Keywords: | Competitiveness, economic growth path, industrial policy, social capital as growth driver, sustainable growth |
| JEL: | O25 L16 |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feu:wfeppr:y:2015:m:12:d:0:i:29&r=soc |
| By: | Asongu, Simplice; Gupta, Rangan |
| Abstract: | The transition from Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has substantially shifted the policy debate from growth to inclusive growth. In this short note, we revisit the trust-growth nexus by exploiting a dataset on quality of growth (QG), recently made available to the scientific community. The empirical evidence is based on interactive contemporary and non-contemporary quantile regressions. Inequality and human development modifying variables are used as additional controls. The findings broadly support the positive role of trust in QG. In addition, relatively high thresholds of inequality are needed to change this positive trust-QG nexus in some distributions. |
| Keywords: | Trust; Inclusive Growth; Conditional Effects |
| JEL: | A13 I30 O40 Z13 |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:68319&r=soc |
| By: | Surajeet Chakravarty (Department of Economics, University of Exeter); Miguel A. Fonseca (Department of Economics, University of Exeter); Sudeep Ghosh (Hong Kong Polytechnic University); Sugata Marjit (DCenter for Studies in the Social Sciences, Calcutta) |
| Abstract: | We examine the impact of religious identity and village-level religious fragmentation on rent seeking behavior. We report on a series of two-player Tullock contest experiments conducted on a sample of 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural West Bengal, India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of religious fragmentation in the village where subjects reside. We find no statistically significant differences in rent seeking behavior across different villages. We also do not find any significant differences in behavior as a function of players' identities. This is in contrast to evidence from the same sample which recorded significant differences in cooperation levels in prisoners' dilemma and stag hunt games. We attribute this to the fact that social identity may have a more powerful effect on cooperation than on confl ict. |
| Keywords: | Social Identity, Social Fragmentation, Artefactual Field Experiment, Rent Seeking. |
| JEL: | C93 D03 H41 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:exe:wpaper:1512&r=soc |
| By: | Caroli, Eve; Weber-Baghdiguian, Lexane |
| Abstract: | We investigate the role of social norms in accounting for differences in self-reported health as reported by men and women. Using the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS, 2010), we first replicate the standard result that women report worse health than men, whatever the health outcome we consider – i.e. general self-assessed health, well-being but also more specific symptoms such as hearing problems, skin problems, backache, muscular pain in upper or lower limbs, headache and eyestrain, stomach ache, respiratory difficulties, depression and anxiety, fatigue and insomnia. We then proxy social norms by the gender structure of the workplace environment and study how the latter affects self-reported health for men and women separately. Our findings indicate that individuals in workplaces where women are a majority tend to report worse health than individuals employed in mixed-gender work environments, be they men or women. The opposite holds for individuals in workplaces where men are a majority: men tend to report fewer health problems than when employed in mixed-gender environments and the same goes for women – although the effects are not significant at conventional levels. These results are robust to controlling for a large array of working condition indicators, which allows us to rule out that the poorer health status reported by individuals working in female-dominated environments could be due to worse job quality. We interpret this evidence as suggesting that social norms associated with specific gender environments play an important role in explaining differences in health-reporting behaviours across sex, at least in the workplace. |
| Keywords: | health, gender, social norms, job quality |
| Date: | 2015–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpm:docweb:1517&r=soc |
| By: | Antonios Garas; Celine Rozenblat; Frank Schweitzer |
| Abstract: | How are economic activities linked to geographic locations? To answer this question, we use a data-driven approach that builds on the information about location, ownership and economic activities of the world's 3,000 largest firms and their almost one million subsidiaries. From this information we generate a bipartite network of cities linked to economic activities. Analysing the structure of this network, we find striking similarities with nested networks observed in ecology, where links represent mutualistic interactions between species. This motivates us to apply ecological indicators to identify the unbalanced deployment of economic activities. Such deployment can lead to an over-representation of specific economic sectors in a given city, and poses a significant thread for the city's future especially in times when the over-represented activities face economic uncertainties. If we compare our analysis with external rankings about the quality of life in a city, we find that the nested structure of the city-firm network also reflects such information about the quality of life, which can usually be assessed only via dedicated survey-based indicators. |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1512.02859&r=soc |