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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
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Issue of 2020‒04‒27
eleven papers chosen by Fabio Sabatini Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Michael Bailey; Abhinav Gupta; Sebastian Hillenbrand; Theresa Kuchler; Robert J. Richmond; Johannes Stroebel |
| Abstract: | We use anonymized data from Facebook to construct a new measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 180 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more with each other when they are more socially connected and when they share social connections with a similar set of other countries. The social connections that determine trade in each product are those between the regions where the product is produced in the exporting country and those where it is used in the importing country. Once we control for social connectedness, the estimated effect of geographic distance on trade declines substantially, and the effect of country borders disappears. Our findings suggest that social connectedness increases trade by reducing information asymmetries and by providing a substitute for both trust and formal mechanisms of contract enforcement. We also present evidence against omitted variables and reverse causality as alternative explanations for the observed relationships between social connectedness and trade flows. |
| JEL: | F1 F6 G0 |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26960&r=all |
| By: | Hunt Allcott; Levi Boxell; Jacob C. Conway; Matthew Gentzkow; Michael Thaler; David Y. Yang |
| Abstract: | We study partisan differences in Americans’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republicans and Democrats engage in social distancing and other efforts to reduce disease transmission. We develop a simple model of a pandemic response with heterogeneous agents that clarifies the causes and consequences of heterogeneous responses. We use location data from a large sample of smartphones to show that areas with more Republicans engage in less social distancing, controlling for other factors including state policies, population density, and local COVID cases and deaths. We then present new survey evidence of significant gaps between Republicans and Democrats in beliefs about personal risk and the future path of the pandemic. |
| JEL: | D72 I12 I18 |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26946&r=all |
| By: | Lesley Chiou; Catherine Tucker |
| Abstract: | This paper measures the role of the diffusion of high-speed Internet on an individual's ability to self-isolate during a global pandemic. We use data that tracks 20 million mobile devices and their movements across physical locations, and whether the mobile devices leave their homes that day. We show that while income is correlated with differences in the ability to stay at home, the unequal diffusion of high-speed Internet in homes across regions drives much of this observed income effect. We examine compliance with state-level directives to avoid leaving your home. Devices in regions with either high-income or high-speed Internet are less likely to leave their homes after such a directive. However, the combination of having both high income and high-speed Internet appears to be the biggest driver of propensity to stay at home. Our results suggest that the digital divide---or the fact that income and home Internet access are correlated---appears to explain much inequality we observe in people's ability to self-isolate. |
| JEL: | L96 L98 M15 |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26982&r=all |
| By: | Ufuk Akcigit; Salomé Baslandze; Francesca Lotti |
| Abstract: | How do political connections affect firm dynamics, innovation, and creative destruction? To answer this question, we build a firm dynamics model, where we allow firms to invest in innovation and/or political connection to advance their productivity and to overcome certain market frictions. Our model generates a number of theoretical testable predictions and highlights a new interaction between static gains and dynamic losses from rent-seeking in aggregate productivity. We test the predictions of our model using a brand-new dataset on Italian firms and their workers. Our dataset spans the period from 1993 to 2014, where we merge: (i) firm-level balance sheet data, (ii) social security data on the universe of workers, (iii) patent data from the European Patent Office, (iv) the national registry of local politicians, and (v) detailed data on local elections in Italy. We find that firm-level political connections are widespread, especially among large firms, and that industries with a larger share of politically connected firms feature worse firm dynamics. We identify a leadership paradox: when compared to their competitors, market leaders are much more likely to be politically connected but much less likely to innovate. In addition, political connections relate to a higher rate of survival, as well as growth in employment and revenue, but not in productivity—a result that we also confirm using a regression discontinuity design. |
| Keywords: | political connections; productivity; innovation; firm dynamics; creative destruction |
| JEL: | O30 O43 |
| Date: | 2020–04–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedawp:87833&r=all |
| By: | Daniel Horn (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies and Corvinus University of Budapest); Hubert Kiss Janos (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies and Corvinus University of Budapest); Sára Khayouti (University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 11, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands) |
| Abstract: | Since trust correlates with economic development and in turn economic development associates with political regime, we conjecture that there may be a relationship between trust and political regime. We investigate if trust aggregated on the country level correlates with the political regime. We do not find any significant association, with or without taking into account other factors (e.g. regional location, economic development, geographic conditions, culture) as well. |
| Keywords: | political regime, trust |
| JEL: | D02 D12 |
| Date: | 2020–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:2013&r=all |
| By: | Elvis Cheng Xu |
| Abstract: | We conduct a field trust game under a natural experiment context to test the impacts of urbanisation on trust. We conjecture that urbanisation, defined in this context as the process of state-led rural-urban migration, contributes to a transformation of trust levels among co-villagers and towards outsiders. We test this conjecture in an experimental approach and more generally, examine whether the urbanisation will produce significant impacts on in-group trust and out-group trust. The research finds that urbanisation does not decrease significantly the trust towards co-villagers, meaning the in-group trust did not change statistically significantly. However, the trust towards outsiders does increase as a result of the state-led urbanisation. We also run a regression on the trust exhibited towards participants in the experiment and found the partial effect of whether they are co-villagers or outsiders weakens as a result of the urbanisation, and therefore conclude urbanisation decreases out-group discrimination in trust. |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feb:artefa:00676&r=all |
| By: | Brodeur, Abel (University of Ottawa); Mabeu, Marie Christelle (University of Ottawa); Pongou, Roland (University of Ottawa) |
| Abstract: | A large literature documents persistent impacts of formal historical institutions. However, very little is known about how these institutions interact with ancestral traditions to determine long-term economic and social outcomes. This paper addresses this question by studying the persistent effect of legal origins on female economic empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa, and how ancestral cultural norms of gender roles may attenuate or exacerbate this effect. Taking advantage of the arbitrary division of ancestral ethnic homelands across countries with different legal origins, we directly compare women among the same ethnic group living in civil law countries and common law countries. We find that, on average, women in common law countries are signicantly more educated, are more likely to work in the professional sector, and are less likely to marry at young age. However, these effects are either absent or significantly lower in settings where ancestral cultural norms do not promote women’s rights and empowerment. In particular, we find little effect in bride price societies, patrilocal societies, and societies where women were not involved in agriculture in the past. Our findings imply that to be optimal, the design of formal institutions should account for ancestral traditions. |
| Keywords: | legal origins, ancestral norms, women's empowerment, gender roles |
| JEL: | D03 I25 J16 N37 |
| Date: | 2020–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13105&r=all |
| By: | Bruno Carvalho; Claudia Custodio; Benny Geys; Diogo Mendes; Susana Peralta |
| Abstract: | We study the impact of information about central government on voters’ perception of government performance and subsequent voting behavior. We randomly expose voters to media articles with positive, neutral or negative information about government policy actions prior to the 2017 Portuguese local elections. We find that treated voters update their perceptions about the incumbent. This update is more pronounced among voters exposed to negative news (negativity bias), first-time voters, and individuals who report a lower interest in politics. We do not find evidence of an average treatment effect on voting behaviour. However, we find that, when exposed to negative information, initially undecided voters are more likely to cast a blank vote, to abstain or to vote for opposition parties. Overall, our findings suggest that voters’ sensitivity to information is heterogeneous and depends on the level of education and political awareness. |
| Keywords: | Media, Information; Negativity Bias; Performance Perception; Local Elections |
| JEL: | D72 D83 H11 H70 |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eca:wpaper:2013/304574&r=all |
| By: | Arieli, Itai; Babichenko, Yakov; Peretz, Ron; Young, H. Peyton |
| Abstract: | New ways of doing things often get started through the actions of a few innovators, then diffuse rapidly as more and more people come into contact with prior adopters in their social network. Much of the literature focuses on the speed of diffusion as a function of the network topology. In practice, the topology may not be known with any precision, and it is constantly in flux as links are formed and severed. Here, we establish an upper bound on the expected waiting time until a given proportion of the population has adopted that holds independently of the network structure. Kreindler and Young (2014) demonstrated such a bound for regular networks when agents choose between two options: the innovation and the status quo. Our bound holds for directed and undirected networks of arbitrary size and degree distribution, and for multiple competing innovations with different payoffs. |
| Keywords: | Innovation diffusion; social networks; speed of equilibrium convergence |
| JEL: | J1 |
| Date: | 2020–03–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:102538&r=all |
| By: | Francesco Agostinelli (Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania); Matthias Doepke (Department of Economics, Northwestern University); Giuseppe Sorrenti (Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam); Fabrizio Zilibotti (Cowles Foundation, Yale University) |
| Abstract: | As children reach adolescence, peer interactions become increasingly central to their development, whereas the direct influence of parents wanes. Nevertheless, parents may continue to exert leverage by shaping their children’s peer groups. We study interactions of parenting style and peer effects in a model where children’s skill accumulation depends on both parental inputs and peers, and where parents can affect the peer group by restricting who their children can interact with. We estimate the model and show that it can capture empirical patterns regarding the interaction of peer characteristics, parental behavior, and skill accumulation among US high school students. We use the estimated model for policy simulations. We ï¬ nd that interventions (e.g., busing) that move children to a more favorable neighborhood have large effects but lose impact when they are scaled up because parents’ equilibrium responses push against successful integration with the new peer group. |
| Date: | 2020–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2228&r=all |
| By: | Fakih, Ali (Lebanese American University); Makdissi, Paul (University of Ottawa); Marrouch, Walid (Lebanese American University); Tabri, Rami V. (University of Sydney); Yazbeck, Myra (University of Queensland) |
| Abstract: | This paper uses the 2013 World Value Survey, as well as the 2016 and 2018 waves of the Arab Barometer, to analyze the dynamics of trust in public institutions in Lebanon. It finds strong evidence that confidence in most public institutions has decreased between 2013 and 2016. The evidence of this decrease is robust to the numerical scale assigned to the different ordinal categories of trust and to assumptions on the missing values generating process. This finding highlights the importance for policymakers in developing countries to survey the perceptions and political attitude of their constituents in order to improve the performance of public institutions. |
| Keywords: | confidence, institutions, uprising, ordinal variable |
| JEL: | D72 O53 P16 P40 |
| Date: | 2020–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13104&r=all |