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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
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Issue of 2025–05–05
eleven papers chosen by Fabio Sabatini, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Baumgartner, Stefanie S. (University of Fribourg); Galeotti, Fabio (CNRS, GATE); Madies, Thierry (University of Fribourg); Villeval, Marie Claire (CNRS) |
| Abstract: | Trust plays a crucial role in refugees’ integration. This study examines how social information about trust levels among peers from home and host countries affects non-Western refugees’ trust. Using a trust game, we measured experimentally trust levels among Swiss citizens, Turkish refugees, and Afghan refugees. We found that Turkish refugees exhibited higher trust levels than Afghan refugees, but no significant trust differences were found between Swiss participants and either refugee group. Turkish refugees adjusted their trust to match Swiss levels when receiving social information, but observation by compatriots reduced this effect. By contrast, Afghan refugees exhibited a more limited response to social information, except when told their behavior would be revealed, which led them to align more closely with Swiss trust levels. These findings highlight the complex impact of social information on refugee trust behavior and suggest that trust can be a social norm. |
| Keywords: | refugees, trust, social information, lab-in-the-field experiment |
| JEL: | C91 D83 D91 F22 J61 |
| Date: | 2025–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17822 |
| By: | Gustavo J. Bobonis; Anke Kessler; Xin Zhao; Anke S. Kessler |
| Abstract: | To what extent can anti-corruption measures serve to limit patronage and corrupt networks effectively and sustainably in clientelist societies with a prevailing norm of corruption? We develop a political agency model in which office holders are motivated to reduce rent seeking behavior through re-election incentives operating via elections and audits (formal institutions), but also through reputational or self-image concerns that are influenced by the prevailing norm on corruption in their peer group (informal institutions). We show that, while the formal institutions of audits and elections have the desired direct effect of reducing corruption, they also affect informal rules of conduct, which can have unintended effects. In particular, in clientelist societies with high levels of corruption, the social concerns work in opposition to formal incentives provided by anti-corruption efforts. Applying the theory to data from Puerto Rico’s anti-corruption municipal audits program, we find evidence consistent with the idea that anti-corruption measures are less effective due to social spillovers. |
| Keywords: | norms of corruption, informal institutions, audits, electoral discipline |
| JEL: | D73 D72 D91 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11715 |
| By: | Pei Kuang; Michael Weber; Shihan Xie; Michael Weber |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the impact of political polarization on public trust in the Fed and its influence on macroeconomic expectations. Using a large-scale survey experiment which we fielded on President Trump’s 2025 inauguration day, we study how households form beliefs about the Fed regarding its political leaning, independence, and trustworthiness. Political alignment significantly shapes perceptions: individuals who view the Fed as politically aligned report higher independence of and trust in the Fed, leading to lower inflation expectations and uncertainty. Strategic communication on institutional structure and policy objectives effectively mitigates perception biases, reinforcing the Fed’s credibility and enhancing its policy effectivenes. |
| Keywords: | central bank communication, partisan, trust, expectations |
| JEL: | D83 D84 D72 E70 E31 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11708 |
| By: | Stanley Feldman; Mikael Hjerm; William Nilsson; José Gabriel Romero Ciavatto; Steven Stillman |
| Abstract: | The literature on political socialization highlights the importance of parents and friends, but it is rare to find studies analyzing these socializing agents in the same model. In contrast, friends are often limited to one or a few friends that may not account for the actual effect of friends. The reason is that standard datasets do not collect information on the entire network of people's friends. Importantly, having an incomplete network can lead to biased estimates of network effects. To overcome this problem, we surveyed 419 students who recruited an additional 4500 social contacts who answered a shorter survey. Controlling for potentially endogenous network formation and using second-order peers to instrument for direct network effects, we find important political socialization from parents and friends on anti-immigrant sentiment and voting intentions among the students we survey. We also show that results differ if we only examine the impact of classroom peers, as is typically done in the literature. Surveying social contacts is a promising way to reach a complete social network, which overcomes data limitations in the current political socialization literature. |
| Keywords: | political socialization, social interactions, anti-immigrant sentiments, authoritarianism, voting intentions. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11806 |
| By: | Amélie Allegre; Oana Borcan; Christa Brunnschweiler; Christa N. Brunnschweiler |
| Abstract: | We examine colonial-era primary education as a determinant of modern-day attainment and gender disparities in education. We construct a novel dataset from the French Protectorate in Morocco, combining archival data on colonial school locations in 1931 and 1954 with the most recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data in arbitrary grids. We analyse the influence of colonial schools on the probability of attaining primary and secondary education in 2004. Overall, schools dedicated to Moroccans in 1931 exhibit a persistent positive impact on education outcomes, but only in the absence of nearby schools reserved for Europeans. Stark gender gaps in access during the Protectorate were narrowed in places with schools for Jewish Moroccans. These had a positive impact on girls’ contemporary levels of education, but a negative impact on the enrolment for boys following the dismantling of Jewish communities after 1948. DHS measures of preferences for female education point to a social norms transmission mechanism between Jewish and Muslim Moroccan communities. |
| Keywords: | education, colonial legacy, female education, Morocco, French Protectorate |
| JEL: | N37 O15 I21 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11725 |
| By: | Viola Angelini; Joan Costa-Font; Berkay Ozcan |
| Abstract: | We study whether receiving a monetary gift from parents increases the intensity of parent-child social contact. We use unique longitudinal data that follows adult children and their older parents for more than a decade (between 2004 and 2015) across various European countries. We first document that bequests, being more visible and subject to legal restrictions on their division, tend to be equalized among children, whereas gifts are less conspicuous and often unevenly distributed. Leveraging the exogenous variation induced by fiscal incentives resulting from inheritance tax legislation reforms, we use an instrumental variable (IV) and an endogenous treatment strategy to investigate the effect of gift-giving on parent-child social contact. Our findings suggest that financial transfers from parents to children lead to an increase in the intensity of parent-child interactions. We estimate that the receipt of a gift gives rise to a 12% increase in social contact. |
| Keywords: | gift giving, inter-vivos transfers, upstream social contact, inheritance tax-reforms, inheritance tax, gifts, bequests Europe |
| JEL: | J14 H29 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11695 |
| By: | Peter Achim; Jan Knoepfle |
| Abstract: | A principal continually decides whether to approve resource allocations to an agent, who exerts private effort to remain eligible. The principal must perform costly inspections to determine the agent's eligibility. We characterize Markov Perfect Equilibria and analyze the paths of trust and oversight that emerge from the dynamic interplay of effort and oversight. At high trust levels, effort is an intertemporal substitute to oversight, which leads to unique interior effort choices and random inspections. At low trust levels, effort is an intertemporal complement to oversight, which may create a coordination problem, leading to equilibrium multiplicity. Voluntary disclosure can mitigate this coordination issue. |
| Date: | 2025–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2504.02696 |
| By: | Xu, Tao Louie; Zhu, Weiwei |
| Abstract: | This research identifies the causality between entrepreneurial behaviour and informal institutions of social trust within the context of China’s development. Revisiting the Polanyi-Schumpeter theoretical framework, entrepreneurship embedded in social relations interlinked by trust is a dynamo of sustainable socioeconomic progress. The institutionalised trust, however, was not clarified. With micro-individual data from the Chinese General Social Survey 2011–2021, our research employs the instrumental variable approach rooted in historical rice farming to tackle endogeneity. The results demonstrate that social trust elevates entrepreneurial engagement by 32.65 and 10.37 percentage points in self-employment and business incorporation, respectively. Increased trust paradoxically hampers self-employment in the central due to insular networks and structural disparities. The findings uncover the nuanced role of social trust in facilitating and constraining entrepreneurship with contextually regional determinants. The research contributes to knowledge and evidence of institutional endowments that mediate entrepreneurial agency and argues for synchronising formal and informal institutions in development. |
| Date: | 2025–03–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:nka6s_v3 |
| By: | Florian Zimmer; Janosch Haber; Mayuko Kaneko |
| Abstract: | As data is increasingly acknowledged as a highly valuable asset, much effort has been put into investigating inter-organisational data sharing, aiming at utilising the value of formerly unused data. Moreover, most researchers agree, that trust between actors is key for successful data sharing activities. However, existing research oftentimes focus on trust from a data provider perspective. Therefore, our work highlights the unbalanced view of trust, addressing it from a data consumer perspective. More specifically, our aim is to investigate trust enhancing measures on a data level, that is data trustworthiness. We found, that existing data trustworthiness enhancing solutions do not meet the requirements of the domain of inter-organisational data sharing. Therefore, our study addresses this gap. Conducting a rigorous design science research approach, this work proposes a new Levels of Assurance for Data Trustworthiness artifact. Built on existing artifacts, we demonstrate, how it addresses the identified challenges within the domain appropriately. We found that our novel approach requires more work to be suitable for adoption. Still, we are confident that our solution can increase consumer trust. We conclude by contributing to the body of design knowledge and emphasise the need for more attention to be put into consumer trust. |
| Date: | 2025–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2503.24149 |
| By: | Muhammad Hassan Bin Afzal; Foluke Omosun |
| Abstract: | This study examines how political engagement shapes public attitudes toward legal immigration in the United States. Using nationally weighted data from the 2024 ANES Pilot Study, we construct a novel Political Engagement Index (PAX) based on five civic actions: discussing politics, online sharing, attending rallies, wearing political symbols, and campaign volunteering. By applying weighted ordered logistic regression models, we find that higher engagement predicts greater support for easing legal immigration, even after adjusting for education, gender, age, partisanship, income, urban residence, and generalized social trust. To capture the substantive effect, we visualize predicted probabilities across levels of engagement. In full-sample models, the likelihood of supporting "a lot harder" immigration drops from 26% to 13% as engagement rises, while support for "a lot easier" increases from 10% to 21%. Subgroup analyses by partisanship show consistent directionality, with notable shifts among Republicans. Social trust and education are also consistently associated with more open attitudes, while older respondents tend to support less lenient pathways to legal immigration policies. These findings suggest that a cumulative increase in political participation is linked to support for legal immigration pathways, with varying intensity across partisan identities and socio-demographic characteristics. |
| Date: | 2025–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2504.03768 |
| By: | Justin Valasek; Weijia Wang; Justin Mattias Valasek |
| Abstract: | The experimental literature on preferences for redistribution has established that individual perceptions of what earning distributions are fair depend greatly on context. In this paper, we study an important and novel dimension of context: whether the choice to redistribute occurs before workers work and accrue earnings, or after. Contrary to the predictions of our theoretical framework, we find no evidence that spectators are less likely to equalize earnings ex ante than to equalize earnings ex post. Interestingly, our study also suggests that, relative to American subjects, Scandinavian subjects are more likely to equalize ex post earnings, but we find no evidence that Scandinavian and American subjects make different choices ex ante. A follow-up analysis suggests that the latter result is largely due to Scandinavian and American subjects having similar preferences over ex ante redistribution when equalizing earnings comes at a cost to efficiency. Overall, our results suggest that context-dependent preferences for redistribution are sensitive to the relative timing of the redistribution choice. |
| Keywords: | inequality, fairness, institutions, experiment. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11804 |