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on Social Norms and Social Capital |
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Issue of 2026–04–06
eight papers chosen by Fabio Sabatini, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” |
| By: | Enrico Rubolino; Enrico Rubolino |
| Abstract: | Declining civic engagement increasingly strains welfare state institutions. This paper asks whether civic values can be shaped through early educational investments. I study Tax and School, a large-scale program implemented in Italian primary and secondary schools to promote fiscal and civic responsibility. Exploiting staggered cross-municipality adoption, I find that exposure increases students' intrinsic motivation for rule compliance and reduces antisocial behaviors, particularly in socio-economically disadvantaged contexts. These student-level responses gradually aggregate into community-level outcomes: exposed municipalities later exhibit higher voter turnout and stronger support for redistributive policies. Survey evidence points to belief updating about the value of public goods and the role of government in mitigating inequality as a central mechanism. Counterfactual simulations imply that scaling the program could attenuate the secular decline in voter turnout. |
| Keywords: | civic capital, civic education, tax morale, political participation |
| JEL: | I21 H26 D72 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12575 |
| By: | Marina Gertsberg; Michaela Pagel; Ekaterina Volkova; Valeria Volkova |
| Abstract: | The Epstein files, released between September 2025 and January 2026, offer an unprecedented window into the social and professional network of a convicted sex offender whose ties extended deep into corporate America. We construct a comprehensive sample of all S&P 500 CEOs and board members serving between 2006 and 2026 - 52, 266 unique individuals - and search the 1, 293, 753 text-bearing documents for evidence of their contact with Jeffrey Epstein. Using large language model (LLM) classification of 117, 394 matched correspondences, we identify 67, 637 that indicate direct contact with 1, 179 S&P 500 CEOs or directors. We then document three main findings. First, firms whose CEOs or board members appeared in Epstein-related news coverage experienced significantly negative cumulative abnormal returns of up to -8.5% over a ten-day window following the January 30, 2026 DOJ release. Second, adding Epstein-mediated ties to the firm network increases overall density and reduces average path lengths significantly, meaning that Epstein effectively wired corporate America into a denser, more tightly interconnected governance network than would have existed otherwise. Third, we show that Epstein's network transmitted norm contagion through shared board connections. Firms with more Epstein-connected CEOs or directors exhibit significantly worse ESG outcomes: each additional connection is associated with approximately 2.3 more annual governance incidents and 4.0 more total incidents. |
| Keywords: | Epstein files, connections, networks, corporate governance |
| JEL: | G30 G34 G38 J16 K38 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12580 |
| By: | Nguyen, Duc Manh (Monash University) |
| Abstract: | This study investigates how the experience of conflict and the framing of post-conflict identity affect trust. In a pre-registered laboratory experiment in Vietnam, implemented shortly after the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, 534 partici- pants were randomly assigned to either a treatment group that engaged in a multi-round competitive game intended to simulate conflict (called the “Attacker/Defender†game) (Gross et al., 2022) before playing the Trust game under four identity framings: paired with someone from the opposing group of the conflict, the same group, with no information about partner’s prior group, or with a new, neutral group identity designed to symbolically represent an absence of relation with conflict, or a control group which only take part in the Trust Game. We find that playing the Attacker/Defender game (i.e., being exposed to conflict in the lab) lowers trust by 13–21%, regardless of which side participants were in the conflict. |
| Keywords: | Trust ; Intergroup Conflict ; Identity Framing ; Laboratory Experiment JEL classifications: D91 ; Z13 ; D83 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:wrkesp:94 |
| By: | Daria Denti; Alessandra Faggian; Marco Modica; Ilan Noy |
| Abstract: | Do earthquakes strengthen social cohesion or undermine it? While some theories suggest they strengthen social bonds, others suggest they lead to social disintegration. We add to the limited causal evidence on this phenomenon using the 2012 Northern Italy earthquake, and exploit a unique dataset that captures different earthquake characteristics and multiple dimensions of social cohesion through behavioral measures. Difference-in-differences and event-study estimates show that the earthquake shifted behavior toward individualism and out-group hostility, and that short-run increases in linking social capital were followed by later erosion. Critically, dwelling damage had stronger and more persistent effects than the physical shaking, suggesting that visible, measurable destruction has a more profound impact on social cohesion. These findings further advance our understanding by demonstrating that different dimensions of social cohesion respond differently to earthquakes, with varying recovery patterns depending on earthquake characteristics. |
| Keywords: | disasters, earthquake, social norms, social cohesion, individualism |
| JEL: | Q54 J12 J15 K42 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12585 |
| By: | Snir, Avichai; Levy, Dudi; Wang, Dian; Chen, Haipeng (Allan); Levy, Daniel |
| Abstract: | We use survey experiments to demonstrate that manipulating participants’ perceptions of the context can affect their decisions. We ran three survey experiments in the U.S. and Israel with participants from both economics and non-economics majors. In the experiments, participants face a tradeoff between profit maximization (market norm) and workers’ welfare (social norm). Our experimental setup enables us to discriminate between the self-selection and indoctrination effects. Existing studies find that economics and non-economics students make different choices in such situations, which the studies argue is because of differences in personality traits between economics students and others. While such differences might exist, we argue that context also plays an important role. Using priming to manipulate the context, we demonstrate that when participants receive cues signaling that their decision has an economic context, both economics and non-economics students tend to maximize profits. When participants receive cues emphasizing social norms, on the other hand, both economics and non-economics students are less likely to maximize profits. We find that the role of context in determining behavior is at least as large as the baseline differences between economics and non-economics students. |
| Keywords: | Market Norms; Social Norms; Self-Selection; Indoctrination; Self-Interest; Economic Man; Rational Choice; Fairness; Experimental Economics; Laboratory Experiments; Priming; Economists vs. Non-Economists |
| JEL: | A11 A12 A13 A20 B40 C90 C91 D01 D63 D91 P10 |
| Date: | 2026–03–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:128298 |
| By: | Muñoz, Ercio; Sansone, Dario; Tampellini Silva, Joao Pedro |
| Abstract: | Using census data from over 500, 000 dual-earner households in Mexico, we show that couples in which the wife earns just above half of the household income are far less common than those in which she earns just below that threshold a pattern that has been attributed to gender norms that create an aversion to wives outearning their husbands. This gap is two to five times larger than documented in the United States and Northern Europe and has grown over the 20002015 period. Unlike findings for the United States and Northern Europe, the discontinuity is not driven by equal earners, self-employed workers, or co-working couples, and persists across married and cohabiting couples, households with and without children, female-headed households, and couples where the wife is the older partner. Extending the analysis to Brazil and Panama, we find comparable patterns, establishing this as a regional rather than country-specific phenomenon. Among female same-sex couples in Mexico, we detect a similar discontinuity, whereas no consistent pattern emerges for male same-sex couples. Even when women are the primary earners, they continue to supply substantially more nonmarket labor than their male partners on average 36 more weekly hours and convergence in household production slows as the wife's income share rises further above the threshold. |
| Keywords: | Participación laboral femenidad;Parejas del mismo sexo;uso del tiempo |
| JEL: | D13 D91 J12 J15 J16 O15 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:idb:brikps:14545 |
| By: | Torun Dewan (Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science); Christopher Kam (Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia); Jaakko Meriläinen (Department of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics); Janne Tukiainen (Department of Economics, University of Turku) |
| Abstract: | To what extent did class shape political behavior during early democratization and industrialization, and did class voting reflect economic interests or durable political identities? We use newly collected individual-level panel data from open-ballot elections in the nineteenth-century England—around 130, 000 recorded vote choices linked to voters’ occupations across elections—to provide evidence on the class-basis of voting. Voting was strongly structured by occupation: skilled workers and the petite bourgeoisie disproportionately supported Liberals and their free-trade agenda, while the gentry, farm workers, and unskilled workers leaned Conservative. Exploiting within-voter mobility, we show that these alignments reflected durable political identities rather than contemporaneous economic interests: Although socially mobile voters resemble their destination class in cross-sectional comparisons, within-voter estimates show that individuals did not systematically change their vote choice when their class changed. Class-based political alignments were thus behaviorally durable at the individual level, even though the Industrial Revolution profoundly transformed society. |
| Keywords: | Class-based voting, economic voting, poll books, socialization, social mobility, voting behavior |
| JEL: | D72 N33 N93 P00 |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tkk:dpaper:dp179 |
| By: | Tom Kirchmaier; Daniel Matter; Miriam Schirmer |
| Abstract: | This study analyzes criminal career trajectories using a unique administrative dataset of 230, 578 offenders and over 620, 000 criminal offenses recorded by Greater Manchester Police between 2008 and 2019. Moving beyond static co-offending networks, we model individual offense sequences as transitions within a multilayer directed crime network. This allows us to capture temporal dependence and structural progression across crime types and provides an approach that can be used as a scalable method to analyze criminal trajectories at the population level. We find that the majority of offenders (almost 60%) commit only a single recorded offense. Among repeat offenders, specialization deepens over time: the likelihood of committing the same type of crime again rises steadily across consecutive offenses, most strongly for shoplifting, burglary, and fraud. Only 9.14% of persistent offenders remain within a single crime category throughout their recorded career, making diversification the norm rather than the exception among high-frequency offenders. Within these cross-category transitions, public order offenses and weapon possession consistently precede violent crime at every career stage, suggesting structured pathways that may serve as early intervention points. |
| Keywords: | crime networks, crime trajectories, network analysis |
| Date: | 2026–04–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp2168 |