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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
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Issue of 2026–02–23
ten papers chosen by Fabio Sabatini, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Besley, Timothy; Dann, Chris; Dray, Sacha |
| Abstract: | This article explores the relationship between economic growth and trust in government using variation in GDP growth experienced over a lifetime since birth. We assemble a newly harmonized global data set across 11 major opinion surveys, comprising 3.3 million respondents in 166 countries since 1990. Exploiting cohort-level variation, we find that people who have experienced higher GDP growth are more prone to trust their governments, with larger effects found in democracies. Higher-growth experiences are also associated with improved perceptions of government performance and living standards. We find no similar channel between growth experience and interpersonal trust. Second, more recent growth experiences appear to matter most for trust in government, with no detectable effect of growth experienced during one’s formative years, closer to birth, or before birth. Third, we find evidence of a “trust paradox” whereby average trust in government is lower in democracies than in autocracies. Our results are robust to a range of falsification exercises, robustness checks, and single-country evidence using the American National Election Studies and the Swiss Household Panel. |
| JEL: | D84 D91 H11 O12 |
| Date: | 2026–02–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:129614 |
| By: | Bulbulia, Joseph (Victoria University); Kerr, John R; Houkamau, Carla; Osborne, Danny; Wilson, Marc; Yogeeswaran, Kumar; Sibley, Chris G (University of Auckland) |
| Abstract: | Surveys of trust in science are conducted by scientists, creating a structural selection problem: those who distrust science are less likely to participate. In cross-sectional designs this bias is invisible; in panel studies it appears as differential attrition that inflates apparent trust over time. Using five waves (2019–2024) from a national probability panel in New Zealand (N = 42, 681) and multiple imputation to correct attrition bias, we find that apparent gains in the social value of science vanish after correction and that confidence in scientists, after an initial pandemic-era rise, falls to or below baseline by 2024. Simulation analyses indicate that correction methods recover trajectories under standard missing-data assumptions. Categorical estimates reveal hidden erosion of high confidence in scientists and growth in low trust that uncorrected data obscure. |
| Date: | 2026–02–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:tynr4_v1 |
| By: | Ann-Kristin Reitmann (CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Universität Passau [Passau], Leibniz Universität Hannover = Leibniz University Hannover); Clotilde Mahé (VU - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam [Amsterdam], Amsterdam Institute for Global Health & Development [Amsterdam, The Netherlands]); Micheline Goedhuys (Maastricht University [Maastricht]); Eleonora Nillesen (Maastricht University [Maastricht]) |
| Abstract: | We test two common features of the opinion-matching method to elicit personal beliefs and perceived social norms regarding female labor force participation among a sample of young Tunisian men and women. Our survey experiment contains two orthogonal treatment arms. In the first treatment arm, respondents were randomly assigned to answer a direct question about their personal beliefs regarding women working outside the home and an indirect questioning technique that provides more cover for the respondent: the list experiment. We find significant discrepancies between the two, particularly among male respondents -suggesting either biased personal beliefs in the direct question or non-strategic misreporting in the list experiment. It follows that, depending on which method is deemed more credible and which gender sample is considered, the prevalence of pluralistic ignorance varies widely in our setting. For the second treatment arm, we provided half of our sample with a financial incentive when eliciting perceived social norms regarding the appropriateness of women working. We find that financial incentives are necessary for both men and women to distinguish their personal beliefs from their perception of what others believe. |
| Keywords: | List experiment, Opinion-matching method, Female labor force participation, Social norms, Survey experiment |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05496799 |
| By: | Dominik Suri (University of Bonn); Simon Gächter (University of Nottingham); Sebastian Kube (University of Bonn); Johannes Schultz (University of Bonn) |
| Abstract: | Democratic societies depend on citizens following rules even when those rules are set by political opponents. Rising polarization may threaten this behavior. We test the impact of polarization on rule compliance in the United States across three pre-registered waves (May and November 2024; April 2025; n = 8, 340) using the "coins task", which is a non-political, generic rule-following task, where breaking the rule increases payoffs. Participants were randomly assigned to follow rules set by the experimenter, a political co-partisan, a political opponent, or a non-partisan US citizen. Rule compliance ranged from 52.3% to 57.8%, and equivalence testing indicates no meaningful differences across waves or partisan rule-setter identities. However, greater affective distance from partisan rule setters is associated with lower compliance and weaker descriptive and normative beliefs about rule-following. These findings suggest that rule compliance is resilient to the rule-setter's identity. While affective polarization may erode this behavior somewhat, substantial compliance remains: the human tendency to follow rules, even when incentivized to break them, survives the "stress test" of partisan rule-setting in highly polarized times |
| Keywords: | Political polarization, affective polarization, rule-following, coins task, norms, online experiments, political identity, equivalence testing, replication |
| JEL: | C91 D72 D91 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ajk:ajkdps:388 |
| By: | Yan Hu (School of Economics, University of Edinburgh); Stephan Maurer (School of Economics, University of Edinburgh) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we study this question using the historical example of China’s first modern bureaucratic organization, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Drawing on newly digitized personnel records from 1876-1911, we first show that the Chinese clerks employed by the service were predominantly Cantonese. Using the plausibly exogenous transfers of clerks across stations, we then estimate that a non-Cantonese (minority) clerk benefited significantly from meeting at least one colleague from his same province and dialect. Such connections led to faster promotion and a 5.6% salary increase, with even stronger effects when meeting a clerk who was either senior or of high quality. |
| Keywords: | Chinese Maritime Customs Service, social connections, wages, promotion, minorities. |
| JEL: | J15 J31 J45 N35 N75 |
| Date: | 2025–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:edn:esedps:325 |
| By: | Wu, Hangjian; Mentzakis, Emmanouil; Schaafsma, Marije |
| Abstract: | Air pollution is a globally recognised problem that causes premature deaths and economic loss. 95% of these premature deaths occur in developing countries, which often trade off investing in air quality improvement against economic growth. In these countries, economic growth may be prioritised by governments due to resource constraints, causing citizens to experience future air quality deterioration. Evidence from studies in developed countries suggests that social capital can be a potential impactful mediator urging the government to implement more pro-environmental policies. However, little empirical evidence exists for developing countries where environmental governance is often complicated by competing policy priorities. We investigated residents' preferences for clean air in Beijing, China, using a discrete choice experiment. In the experiment, attributes of air pollution were specified as either an improvement or a deterioration as a result of policy prioritisation. The effects of social capital (consisting of social trust, norms and networks) were examined by incorporating social capital indicators into a novel hybrid choice model. The results suggest that social capital was positively associated with individual preferences when air quality was projected to be improved (i.e., higher social capital leads to higher preferences for air quality improvement) as well as deteriorated (i.e., higher social capital leads to higher resistance to air quality deterioration). Our findings imply that in a society with high social capital, policymakers who prioritise economic growth at the expense of the environment are likely to cause considerable public welfare losses. |
| Keywords: | Air quality, discrete choice experiment, social capital, social trust, social norms, social networks |
| JEL: | D6 Q51 Q53 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iedlwp:336688 |
| By: | Ablyatifov, Emin; Lukyanov, Georgy |
| Abstract: | We study optimal taxation when the conversion of tax revenue into public goods is uncertain. In a static Ramsey framework with a representative household, a competitive firm, and two broad instruments (a labor-income tax and a commodity/output tax), a simple measure of trust— the perceived likelihood that revenue is actually delivered as public consumption—scales the marginal value of public funds. We show: (i) a trust threshold below which any distortionary taxation reduces welfare; (ii) above that threshold, policy uniquely pins down the scale of taxation but leaves a continuum of tax mixes (an equivalence frontier) that implement the same allocation and welfare; and (iii) tiny administrative or salience wedges select a unique instrument, typically favoring a broad base collected at source. We derive a trust-adjusted Ramsey rule in sufficient-statistics form, establish robustness to mild preference non-separabilities and concave public-good utility, and provide an isoelastic specialization with transparent comparative statics. |
| Keywords: | Optimal taxation; public goods; credibility; marginal value of public funds; tax; mix; administration. |
| JEL: | E61 H21 H30 C73 |
| Date: | 2026–02–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tse:wpaper:131432 |
| By: | Nybom, Martin (Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy); Mora, José V. Rodríguez (Faculty of CUNEF University); Salvanes, Kjell G. (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) |
| Abstract: | This chapter reviews recent advances on the drivers of intergenerational persistence in education and income, with a focus on causal mechanisms shaping social mobility across OECD countries. While the descriptive literature is vast, documenting substantial correlations between parents’ and children’s outcomes, recent research increasingly emphasizes the underlying factors driving these patterns. We begin with a brief illustration of global variation in intergenerational mobility using harmonized cross-country data, before turning to the literature on mechanisms. We outline a general theoretical framework, which organizes the discussion around three domains: pre-market factors (e.g., early childhood investment, parenting, education systems), labor market dynamics (e.g., sorting, networks, firm heterogeneity), and post-market institutions. We review topics such as the timing and nature of parental investments, parenting styles, credit constraints, neighborhood effects, and the role of social networks in school and on the labor market. We highlight how new data and empirical designs have broadened our understanding of the drivers of intergenerational inequality and, ultimately, interventions with the potential to mitigate it. |
| Keywords: | Intergenerational Mobility; Social networks; Neighborhoods; Labor market |
| JEL: | D85 J13 J62 |
| Date: | 2026–02–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2026_001 |
| By: | Belinda Archibong; Chinemelu Okafor; Evans S. Osabuohien; Tom Moerenhout |
| Abstract: | Can citizen-led protests lead to meaningful economic redistribution and nudge governments to increase redistributive fiscal transfers? We study the effects of protests on fiscal redistribution using evidence from Nigeria. We digitized twenty-six years of public finance data from 1988 to 2016 to examine the effects of protests on intergovernmental transfers. We find that protests increase transfers to protesting regions, but only in areas that are politically aligned with disbursing governments. Evidence from the large-scale 2012 Occupy Nigeria protests confirms these results. Protesters also face increased police violence, particularly in non-aligned regions. The results show that protests can influence fiscal redistribution. |
| JEL: | D7 H2 H7 N47 O10 O43 |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34787 |
| By: | Tom Hutchcroft; Olga Rospuskova; Omer Tamuz |
| Abstract: | We study agents playing a pure coordination game on a large social network. Agents are restricted to coordinate locally, without access to a global communication device, and so different regions of the network will converge to different actions, precluding perfect coordination. We show that the extent of this inefficiency depends on the network geometry: on some networks, near-perfect efficiency is achievable, while on others welfare is strictly bounded away from the optimum. We provide a geometric condition on the network structure that characterizes when near-efficiency is attainable. On networks in which it is unattainable, our results more generally preclude high correlations between outcomes in a large spectrum of dynamic games. |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2602.12571 |