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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
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Issue of 2026–10–05
thirteen papers chosen by Fabio Sabatini, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Anouck Butraud-Assathian (PcEn - Chaire Pluralisme culturel et Ethique du numérique (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Joëlle Farchy (PcEn - Chaire Pluralisme culturel et Ethique du numérique (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)); Léna Laqueyrerie (PcEn - Chaire Pluralisme culturel et Ethique du numérique (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) |
| Abstract: | The article examines the shift in the digital cultural ecosystem triggered by the widespread adoption of Generative AI. Historically, the platformization of cultural industries established an attention economy, where recommendation algorithms were essential for guiding users through overwhelming content catalogs. However, the recent influx of synthetic media has disrupted the dynamic, creating a synthetic tsunami that threatens cultural diversity, undermines user trust, and jeopardizes the livelihoods of human creators. Furthermore, this unchecked proliferation risks model degeneration for the AI systems themselves. To mitigate these economic and social tensions, Digital Service Providers are evolving their algorithmic policies. We analyze how platforms handle AI detection tools, transparent labeling, and adjusted recommendation guidelines to filter and distinguish human creations from automated content. Ultimately, this paper argues that platforms transition from a pure attention economy to a trust economy, actively protecting and highlighting human-made works to preserve the integrity and sustainability of the cultural value chain. |
| Keywords: | trust economy, digitization, recommender systems, GenAI, cultural industries, attention economy |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05751501 |
| By: | Alessandro Belmonte (Department of Economics and Social Sciences - Marche Polytechnic University, Italy); Giuseppe Spataro (Marche Polytechnic University); Davide Ticchi (Department of Economics and Social Sciences - Marche Polytechnic University, Italy) |
| Abstract: | Does information revealing that political elites act against the public interest erode institutional trust and state legitimacy? We examine this question using the Panama Papers, a major disclosure of offshore financial activities involving political leaders and senior public officials worldwide. We construct an original country-level database measuring the timing and intensity of media coverage implicating domestic political figures and combine it with survey data from the Life in Transition Survey, the British Election Study, and Eurobarometer. Across countries, samples, and empirical strategies that identify distinct margins of the scandal, we find that the revelations increased the political salience of taxation and reduced trust in presidents, governments, and parliaments. The reputational consequences thus extended beyond the individuals directly implicated to the institutions through which political authority is exercised, consistent with an erosion of perceived state legitimacy. We also find that the disclosures strengthened support for democracy, suggesting that citizens valued the capacity of democratic institutions and investigative journalism to expose elite misconduct. Yet where domestic political involvement was especially salient, satisfaction with the functioning of democracy declined. |
| Keywords: | State legitimacy, Institutional trust, Democratic assessment, Offshore financial activity. |
| JEL: | D72 D73 H26 L82 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:anc:wpaper:510 |
| By: | Matthew Collins; Eleonora Guarnieri; Helmut Rainer |
| Abstract: | Why does the quantity-quality tradeoff operate in some societies but not others? We study this question using the staggered introduction of free primary education (FPE) in sub-Saharan Africa, which lowered the cost of investing in children’s human capital. Exploiting within-ethnicity variation, we find that FPE reduces fertility and improves child survival and school enrollment, but only among ethnic groups with gender-egalitarian norms. We provide evidence that FPE strengthens women’s empowerment, predominantly among those gender-egalitarian groups. A simple conceptual framework shows that lower schooling costs create incentives to reduce fertility, while prevailing gender norms determine whether households act on those incentives. |
| Date: | 2026–01–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bri:uobdis:26/850 |
| By: | Guarnieri, Eleonora (University of Bristol, CEPR, CESifo); Tur-Prats, Ana (University of California, Merced) |
| Abstract: | Why do some cultures go extinct while others prevail? We show that a society’s risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss, is shaped by its ancestral gender norms and by how these differ from those of competing cultures. Using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index for a global sample of languages, we first show that languages from more gender-equal societies are likelier to go extinct. In our framework, male-dominant societies are more expansionist through two channels, military capacity sustained by surplus extraction and demographic pressure from women's specialization in domestic and reproductive labor, and therefore expand at the expense of gender-egalitarian groups. We test this in two settings. Under European colonization, we find that Indigenous groups more gender-equal than their colonizers are more vulnerable to extinction, which is best explained by asymmetries in male dominance rather than dominance more broadly. Exploiting local variation in neighbors' gender structure across Africa, we show that languages from more gender-egalitarian societies are less likely to survive in cells located close to male-dominant neighbors, with military capacity and population pressure predicting language expansion. |
| Keywords: | cultural diversity, language extinction, gender norms, inter-group contact |
| JEL: | Z10 O10 F54 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18947 |
| By: | Vasiliki Fouka; Marco Tabellini |
| Abstract: | We discuss how immigration affects identity, with implications for politics. We build on key insights from social psychology and their formalization in economics to derive predictions about how immigration changes both self-identification and categorization of others into groups. These immigration-induced identity changes can explain two recent political transformations that have characterized many Western democracies: the rise of right-wing populism and the realignment of voters and parties along a socio-cultural, rather than economic, dimension of political conflict. We also discuss how immigration can reshape group boundaries and political cleavages, depending on the characteristics of immigrants, host populations, and the local context. We highlight open questions and possible directions for future research. |
| JEL: | D72 D91 J15 N32 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35777 |
| By: | Cotofan, Maria; Krekel, Christian; Oparina, Ekaterina |
| Abstract: | Community-based lifestyle interventions combining physical exercise with volunteering are promoted as low-cost, scalable support for those with mental health problems, and feature prominently in social prescribing. Yet robust evidence that they are effective at scale, outside controlled trials, remains scarce. We evaluate a nationwide UK intervention that combines exercise and volunteering in local communities. Using three waves of incentivised surveys (February 2023 to March 2024; 3590 observations from 2856 respondents) linked to administrative data on participation, we compare participants with those who signed up but did not participate, including for plausibly exogenous reasons. Participation is associated with lower mental ill health and loneliness, and higher feelings of belonging, connectedness, and trust. The estimates are sizeable and persist beyond six months. Benefits substantially exceed costs. Our findings suggest that community-based exercise and volunteering can deliver meaningful mental health improvements at low cost and at scale, offering policy-makers a cost-effective means of relieving pressure on stretched health services. |
| Keywords: | physical exercise;volunteering;mental health;social capital;social value-for-money analysis |
| JEL: | I10 I12 I31 D64 D61 |
| Date: | 2026–11–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:140940 |
| By: | Xieyu Yin; Fenghua Wen |
| Abstract: | Trust can attract fraud when it delays verification. We develop a two-market signaling model in which generative AI lowers fabrication, verification, and targeting costs. When fabrication becomes profitable before verification, claim credibility first falls and later recovers. Across markets, higher prior quality can delay verification, creating an interval in which only the lower-quality market checks. If targeting becomes profitable in this interval, deceptive sellers enter the higher-quality but less vigilant market, and their entry can initially reverse its reliability advantage. The inflow also triggers verification and deters further entry. We call this self-limiting mechanism trust arbitrage. In the age of generative AI, trust can thus create an endogenous but temporary protection gap that redirects deception across markets. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.27404 |
| By: | Ajzenman, Nicolas (McGill University); Aksoy, Cevat Giray (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development); Pickard, Harry (Newcastle University) |
| Abstract: | Populists govern more of the world’s countries than at any point in the past century, on both the right and the left. What they share is not an economic programme but a worldview that casts politics as a struggle between ordinary citizens and a self-serving establishment, a conflict that is zero-sum at its core. We show that exposure to this political environment leaves a durable imprint on citizens’ beliefs. Combining data on populist leaders with surveys of more than 260, 000 respondents in 53 countries, we exploit within-country-survey-year variation across birth cohorts and find that greater exposure during early adulthood is associated with stronger zerosum beliefs later in life. The result is replicated in two independent surveys and across multiple measures of zero-sum thinking and perceived economic conflict and persists into respondents’ mid-forties. The mechanism evidence provides little support for an economic-scarcity explanation and instead points towards a rhetorical channel, as populist rule features substantially more anti-elite rhetoric in two independent measures and more domestic zero-sum framing in United Nations speeches. |
| Keywords: | populism, zero-sum beliefs, political socialisation, belief formation |
| JEL: | D72 P16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18929 |
| By: | Joshua T. Dean; Christine L. Exley; Muriel Niederle; Heather Sarsons |
| Abstract: | Gender-neutral attitudes judge a behavior the same way regardless of whether a man or a woman does it. Yet surveys of gender attitudes typically ask respondents to evaluate statements about men's or women's behaviors in isolation, never eliciting how the same behavior is evaluated when assigned to the other gender. Such responses therefore cannot reveal whether respondents perceive society as holding gender-neutral views. We introduce paired (role-reversed) elicitation, which varies the gender assigned to otherwise identical behaviors. In a representative sample of Americans, responses to standard statements suggest that few respondents perceive society as holding traditional views toward women. In isolation, this may be seen as evidence that society has moved past gender roles that confine choices. The paired elicitation, however, reveals a gender-neutrality gap: only about half of respondents report the same beliefs across the standard and role-reversed statements, even though these statements only vary in terms of which gender is assigned to which behavior. Thus, a substantial portion of respondents believe that the social acceptability of different actions depends on gender. Paired responses also uncover substantial heterogeneity and reveal broader underlying beliefs driving responses, such as beliefs about work and family rather than gender-specific views. |
| JEL: | D1 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35761 |
| By: | Aminjonov, Ulugbek (Trier University); Bargain, Olivier (University of Bordeaux) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how combinations of ancestral cultural norms are associated with women’s empowerment across ethnic groups worldwide. Linking DHS data to the Ethnographic Atlas, we develop a hybrid supervised–unsupervised approach combining Partial Least Squares and k-means clustering to identify five probabilistic normative regimes. Severe disempowerment is associated with an accumulation of restrictive norms, while religious norms and women’s agricultural roles distinguish higher-empowerment environments within broadly patriarchal configurations. Further up the gradient, contrasts concern hierarchical social institutions, then kinship and the loosening of patriarchal arrangements, before more gender-neutral configurations prevail at the highest empowerment levels. Norms’ salience varies with the configurations in which they are embedded, revealing strongly non-monotonic patterns. These findings are robust to adjustment for contemporary socioeconomic conditions and a range of sensitivity checks. The analysis provides a global mapping of ancestral normative environments associated with women’s agency and identifies configurations most closely related to severe intra-household inequality. |
| Keywords: | women’s empowerment, ancestral norms, cultural persistence, kinship systems, machine learning, gender inequality, DHS, Ethnographic Atlas |
| JEL: | J16 O15 Z13 C38 D13 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18955 |
| By: | Erik O. Kimbrough (Chapman University); Brennan McDavid (Chapman University); Diba Vazirian (Chapman University) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies delegation to artificial intelligence in a setting where human principals retain the consequences of delegated choices. Participants wrote prompts instructing ChatGPT-4o mini how to choose on their behalf in three canonical economic domains: risky choice, intertemporal choice, and social allocation. We then elicited the compensation participants required to let the AI’s choices count for payment and compared participants’ own choices to choices generated from their prompts. The design produces two central empirical objects: a revealed measure of reluctance to delegate, captured by willingness to accept compensation for AI delegation, and a behavioral measure of alignment, captured by the share of decisions on which the participant and AI made the same choice. We supplement the original experiment with two benchmarks: a human-agent follow-up in which other participants attempted to implement the same prompts, and an ex post robustness exercise using GPT-5.5. The results show substantial reluctance to delegate despite moderate-to-high alignment, and they suggest that misalignment reflects not only model limitations but also the difficulty of communicating delegable preferences through short natural-language prompts. |
| Keywords: | AI, Trust, Experiments, Preferences |
| JEL: | C91 D91 D83 D81 O33 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:26-11 |
| By: | Sriram Balasubramanian; Mr. Paul Cashin |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the origins and evolving use of the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) in the Kingdom of Bhutan, and the relationship between measured well-being and macroeconomic indicators across four decades of data. The paper incorporates the 2022 GNH Survey, alongside substantially updated macroeconomic data capturing Bhutan’s experience through the COVID-19 pandemic, and the launch of its ambitious 13th Five-Year Plan (2024–2029). The evidence continues to show that Bhutan’s rapid increase in national income remains only weakly associated with improvements in measured happiness—a pattern that is suggestive of the Easterlin Paradox. The updated GNH index indicates continued progress in well-being alongside sustained economic growth. Drawing on the literature linking cultural norms to economic development, we argue that Bhutan’s cultural endowment is on balance an asset for its growth prospects. GNH exemplifies how a culture-neutral well-being measure becomes more effective for policymaking when assimilated to relevant local cultural norms and values. |
| Keywords: | Gross National Happiness; GDP; Bhutan; Easterlin Paradox; well-being; development economics; cultural norms |
| Date: | 2026–09–18 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2026/192 |
| By: | Fan, Junwei (University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School); Montoya-Blandon, Santiago (University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School); Proto, Eugenio (University of Birmingham, CAGE) |
| Abstract: | We examine how social comparison within endogenously formed peer networks affects different measures of young adult mental health. Using over 2 million smartphone-based communication records from the NetHealth Study, we construct objective social networks among university students and estimate a structural model in which individuals choose their peers and mental health depends on the income of chosen peers. When networks are treated as exogenous, higher average peer income predicts better mental health; once network formation is modelled endogenously, the relationship reverses: exposure to higher-income peers significantly worsens depressive symptoms. Income gaps harm mental health in both directions, consistent with inequality aversion rather than relative deprivation. The reversal survives extending binary links to message-weighted networks, and counterfactual exercises show that policies reducing the volume of messages exchanged with peers improve mental health, increasingly so with the size of the reduction, though the effect of targeted reductions depends on which ties are attenuated. Ignoring endogenous peer selection can thus yield qualitatively misleading conclusions about peer effects on mental health. |
| Keywords: | social networks; relative status; mental health; network formation. JEL Classification: D63, D85, D91, I14, I31 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:824 |