do female gender role attitudes affect labour market participation in egypt abstractwe analyse the inter generational relationship of attitudes towards gender roles and their impact on individuals labour market participations in egypt we find a strong correlation between mothers and daughters perceptions of gender roles unlike the existing literature perceptions are not associated with the labour market status even if we control for endogeneity issues using an instrumental variable regression furthermore higher educated females are more likely to be unemployed in egypt these results imply that perceptions among females are not translated into their labour market behaviour and the supply side policies alone may not be sufficient for improving young women s employment opportunities

performance diversity and national identity evidence from association football the increasing national diversity of coworkers has no consensus on its impact on performance using a team s predominant nationality as a proxy for national diversity and national identity there is robust evidence that it affects team and individual performance detailed worker level data from a highly globalized industry association football show a nonlinear relationship between performance and the predominant nationality of a team s roster as the number of members from the predominant nationality increases performance declines however beyond a threshold level performance rises it follows that performance benefits from national diversity when the predominant nationality is small and from national identity when it is large jel m14 z21 z22 j15

optimal inventory and hedging decisions with cvar consideration abstract we consider a newsvendor who makes an ordering decision to meet stochastic demand and buys a put option written on the demand to hedge against the risk of low demand to maximize his expected utility which is measured by the conditional value at risk cvar the put option is fairly priced with specifications for the strike price and the strike quantity with the consideration of lost sale penalty cost we derive structural results on the optimal ordering and hedging polices we show that the newsvendor will not order more than that without the option contract when the strike quantity is pre determined and low and he will order more when the strike quantity is a decision variable moreover the optimal strike quantity is less than or equal to the optimal order quantity in the risk neutral setting and interestingly there are cases in which the optimal hedging ratio first increases then keeps constant as the newsvendor becomes less risk averse we also show that the value of the put option increases as the newsvendor becomes more risk averse and demand becomes more uncertain furthermore the effect of risk aversion on the value of the option highly depends on the magnitudes of the system parameters

keep your friends close the effect of local social networks on child human capital outcomes abstract social networks can affect demand for human capital investments by relaxing household time or budget constraints or by defining and reinforcing human capital preferences however empirically identifying the effect of social networks on human capital investment is usually problematic because households self select their networks in ways that may be correlated with their abilities to make these investments in northern ugandan internally displaced persons camps networks were not entirely self selected rebel activity which forced households into camps in 2002 disrupted pre existing social networks in ways that were exogenous to household human capital preferences this paper uses the exogenous variation in network disruption to identify a positive impact of networks on children s long term nutritional outcomes

natural groups and economic characteristics as driving forces of wage discrimination we investigate whether the origin of an employee provides different motives for wage discrimination in gift exchange experiments with students and migrant workers in china in a lab and an internet experiment subjects in the role of employers can condition their wages on the employees home provinces the resulting systematic differences in wages can be linked to natural groups and economic characteristics of the provinces in group favoritism increases wages for employees who share the same origin as the employer while an increased probability of being matched with an employee with a different ethnicity reduces wages furthermore wages in the laboratory increase with the actual wage level in the employees home province nevertheless employees effort is not influenced by these variables only the wage paid in the experiment influences effort

recognition redistribution and liberty abstract this paper examines the relationship between redistribution recognition and liberty in particular it critiques the existing approaches in the critical literature that either reduces redistribution to a simple subset of recognition or insists that recognition is both necessary and sufficient for redistribution to occur it argues instead that the introduction of the relatively weak assumption of minimal individual liberty is required for recognition and that while recognition is necessary it is insufficient for redistribution it also considers the sustainability of voluntary redistribution in a liberal society and voluntary recognition in an authoritarian society finally the approach is applied to the problems of discrimination genocide and ethnic conflict

racial discrimination in the labor market theory and empirics we review theories of race discrimination in the labor market taste based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread but no existing model explains the unemployment rate differential models of statistical discrimination based on differential observability of productivity across races can explain the pattern and magnitudes of wage differentials but do not address employment and unemployment at their current state of development models of statistical discrimination based on rational stereotypes have little empirical content it is plausible that models combining elements of the search models with statistical discrimination could fit the data we suggest possible avenues to be pursued and comment briefly on the implication of existing theory for public policy jel j15 j31 j64 j71

the effects of moral licensing and moral cleansing in contingent valuation and laboratory experiments on the demand to reduce externalities recent field experiments show that peer information can induce people to reduce their production of negative externalities related work in psychology demonstrates that inducing feelings of relative culpability in one domain can induce spillover pro social behavior in another domain we use a contingent valuation and parallel lab experiment to explore patterns of cross domain responses to norm based interventions asymmetric responses between those whose impacts are above or below the norm are found to be robust across decision settings substantial heterogeneity in responses is observed across a number of dimensions not explored in large field experiments raising questions about the universality of peer information effects and the design of such programs

understanding ethnic identity in africa evidence from the implicit association test iat abstract we use a variant of the implicit association test iat to examine individuals implicit attitudes towards various ethnic groups using a population from the democratic republic of congo we find that the iat measures show evidence of an implicit bias in favor of one s own ethnicity individuals have implicit views of their own ethnic group that are more positive than their implicit views of other ethnic groups we find this implicit bias to be quantitatively smaller than the explicit bias one finds when using self reported attitudes about different ethnic groups

behavioral spillover effects from a social information campaign abstract we investigate whether a social information campaign aimed at reducing water use causes a spillover effect on the use of electricity on average water use decreased by 6 percent for the treatment group we identify a positive spillover effect on electricity use among households that had efficient use of water before the campaign the effect is sizeable almost a 9 percent reduction we argue that these results are consistent with a model of cognitive dissonance where the efficient households infer information about electricity use from the water use information

coordination and contagion individual connections and peer mechanisms in a randomized field experiment abstract this paper investigates peer effects at the level of individual connections leveraging the approach to shed light on peer mechanisms in a field experiment using college freshmen we elicited best friends and offered monetary incentives for gym visits to a treated subset we find large spillovers from treated subjects to treated best friends but none from treated subjects to control best friends we also find evidence of a mechanism subjects coordinate by visiting the gym with best friends indicating that the intervention harnesses complementarities in utility or commitment mechanisms results highlight subtle peer effects and mechanisms that often go undetected

students perceptions of teacher biases experimental economics in schools we put forward a new experimental economics design with monetary incentives to estimate students perceptions of grading discrimination we use this design in a large field experiment which involved 1 200 british students in grade 8 classrooms across 29 schools in this design students are given an endowment they can invest on a task where payoff depends on performance the task is a written verbal test which is graded non anonymously by their teacher in a random half of the classrooms and graded anonymously by an external examiner in the other random half of the classrooms we find significant evidence that students choices reflect perceptions of biases in teachers grading practices our results show systematic gender interaction effects male students invest less with female teachers than with male teachers while female students invest more with male teachers than with female teachers interestingly female students perceptions are not in line with actual discrimination teachers tend to give better grades to students of their own gender results do not suggest that ethnicity and socioeconomic status play a role

social connectedness improves co ordination on individually costly efficient outcomes we study the impact of social ties on behavior in two types of asymmetric coordination games social ties are varied by making players interact with partners from different in groups fellow members of their own sports team members of their sports club students of their university subjective social ties are further measured by direct questionnaires we find that smaller and more salient in groups lead to significantly more group beneficial choices the same effect is observed for players that report high values of their subjective social ties we discuss the implication of these results for theories assuming that socially tied individuals follow some group beneficial reasoning

social identity and governance the behavioral response to female leaders this paper uses data from artefactual field experiments and surveys conducted in 61 villages in india to examine whether men and women respond differently to women as leaders we investigate the extent to which behavior towards female leaders is influenced by experience with women in leadership positions we find evidence of significant male backlash against female leaders which can be attributed to the transgression of social norms and in particular a violation of male identity when women are assigned to positions of leadership through gender based quotas increased exposure to female leaders reduces the extent of bias

housework wages and the division of housework time for employed spouses while the popular press may have declared housework passe with the advent of the two income household see housework is obsolescent by barbara ehrenreich 1993 for one such example the facts indicate that housework continues to consume a substantial amount of time particularly for women while estimates vary widely depending on the sample examined and the methods used to generate the information representative values of housework time range around 6 14 hours per week for men and 20 30 hours for women since wages are likely to be influenced both directly and indirectly by the time and effort devoted to other activities and since gender differences in household responsibilities are significant and often assumed to be a driving force behind gender earnings differentials decisions regarding the overall amount of time spent on housework and the division of that time within the household are important ones the goal of this paper is to shed some light on these allocation decisions we begin by discussing the various methods by which time and effort spent on housework may affect wages and summarize the available empirical evidence overall the empirical evidence indicates that time spent on housework has a negative effect on wages an effect which is most pronounced for women we next examine the amount of time spent on housework and the division of that time between working spouses to do so we draw upon the human capital literature and the bargaining literature to construct simple regression equations for time spent on housework by each spouse as well as the share of housework time contributed by the husband the results indicate that husbands do less housework than their wives as their relative earnings and hours spent in the labor market increase

identity and the economics of organizations on plebes first day at west point called r day they strip down to their underwear their hair is cut off they are put in uniform they then must address an older cadet with the proper salute and with the statement sir new cadet doe reports to the cadet in the red sash for the first time as ordered plebes must stand and salute and repeat and stand and salute and repeat until they get it exactly right all the while being reprimanded for every tiny mistake in the summary of david lipsky 2003 pp 145 154 who spent four years tracking a company of cadets at west point on r day you surrender your old self in stages but r day is just the beginning of the training and personal re engineering that is to come so that west point graduates emerge four years later as loyal officers in the u s army lipsky shows that despite some failure this tough program is remarkably successful in creating officers with the will to lead in battle economists current picture of organizations and work incentives has no place for the west point program and the motivations it seeks to inculcate in recruits in a standard economic model an individual s preferences are fixed and utility depends only on pecuniary variables the army s aim at west point is to change cadets preferences they wish to inculcate non economic motives in the cadets so that they have the same goals as the u s army alternatively stated the goal of west point is to change the identity of the cadets so they will think of themselves above all else as officers in the u s army they will feel bad about themselves they will lose utility if they fall short of the ideals of such an officer this change in identity

gender role attitudes and the labour market outcomes of women across oecd countries this paper uses data from the world value surveys 1990 1995 1999 to investigate the impact of gender role attitudes and work values on women s labour market outcomes across 25 oecd countries anti egalitarian views are found to display the strongest negative association with female employment rates and the gender pay gap these views are however softening among recent cohorts on the other hand perceptions of women s role as homemakers which are likely formed in youth and linked to religious ideology are more persistent over time they could be implicated in the recent slowdown of the gender convergence in pay finally the unavoidable clash between family values and egalitarian views that takes the form of an inner conflict for many women the so called mother s guilt is another obstacle in the path towards greater gender equality in the labour market copyright 2005 oxford university press

explaining micro entrepreneurship in rural vietnam a multilevel analysis in the literature on entrepreneurship there is an ongoing debate about the impact of regional factors on the entrepreneurial process to date most of the empirical work on the influence of regional characteristics on entrepreneurship has focused on developed countries while empirical work that analyses the regional determinants of micro entrepreneurship in rural areas of emerging markets remains scare this paper uses three level binary logistic random intercept models to analyse the effects of explanatory factors at different levels on micro entrepreneurship in rural vietnam our analyses show that identifying the motivation behind starting a micro enterprise is a good way to split entrepreneurship into two groups namely opportunity and necessity driven entrepreneurship which are influenced by very different explanatory factors at different levels we find evidence that in rural areas of emerging markets the individual level dominates with regard to explaining both opportunity and necessity driven entrepreneurship nevertheless the regional level has a significant impact albeit only on opportunity driven entrepreneurship

incentives and service quality in the restaurant industry the tipping service puzzle tipping is a significant economic activity tips in the us food industry alone amount to about 42 billion annually that was claimed to improve service quality and increase economic efficiency because it gives incentives to provide excellent service and therefore allows to avoid costly monitoring of workers the article suggests that this common wisdom might be wrong a simple model shows formally that tips can improve service only if they are sensitive enough to service quality empirical evidence suggests that tips are hardly affected by service quality nevertheless rankings of service quality by customers are very high the co existence of these two findings is denoted the tipping service puzzle and several possible explanations for it are offered

inverse productivity or inverse efficiency evidence from mexico abstractusing a unique panel data set from rural mexico we find strong evidence of a negative relationship between farm size and both productivity and technical efficiency large farms not only have a lower value of output per hectare than small farms they also produce further from the efficiency frontier our findings suggest that in spite of the ongoing transformation of agricultural supply chains and economists recommendations for small farmers to exit crop production there may be sustained advantages for smallholder farms our analysis offers new insights into inverse farm size relationship the productivity efficiency relationship and the use of stochastic frontier techniques

social norms and random matching games abstract nash equilibrium has been tremendously useful in understanding economic problems in which strategic behavior is important the theoretical foundations of the solution concept often include the assumption that the game to be played is common knowledge an unrealistic assumption in games with many players we introduce the concept of norm equilibrium for random matching games a norm equilibrium is a nash equilibrium that relies on substantially less information than common knowledge of the game we use norm equilibria to provide a folk theorem for random matching games and to analyze increasing numbers of players in a random matching game journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c72

environmental policy when consumers value conformity abstract we present a model of consumer behaviour when consumers value conformity and examine the implications for environmental policy the model shares a feature set out in dasgupta et al 2016 of having a structure of preferences for conformity which induces a mass of consumers to adhere exactly to a norm level of consumption clumping however we extend our previous analysis by analysing the conditions for the existence and potential uniqueness of consumption norms in doing so we introduce threshold effects whereby individuals adhere to a norm only if sufficiently many others do so taken together these have striking implications for environmental policy in the case where the norm good generates pollution emissions clumping means many individuals will not change behaviour unless the norm changes while threshold effects plus clumping means that it may be hard to change a norm we show that the use of pigovian taxes to control behaviour may be either ineffective or welfare reducing and that the optimal pigovian tax will work only if it is above some threshold level there are parameter values for which quantity based injunctive policies raise welfare relative to no intervention while optimal pigovian taxes would lower welfare

carbon geography the political economy of congressional support for legislation intended to mitigate greenhouse gas production over the last 5 years the u s congress has voted on several pieces of legislation intended to sharply reduce the nation s greenhouse gas emissions given that climate change is a world public bad standard economic logic would predict that the united states would free ride and wait for other nations to reduce their emissions within the congress there are clear patterns to who votes in favor of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions this paper presents a political economy analysis of the determinants of pro green votes on such legislation conservatives consistently vote against such legislation controlling for a representative s ideology representatives from richer districts and districts with a lower per capita carbon dioxide footprint are more likely to vote in favor of climate change mitigation legislation representatives from districts where industrial emissions represent a larger share of greenhouse gas emissions are more likely to vote no jel q54 q58 r50

social identity and inequality the impact of china s hukou system abstract we conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals performance under incentives we focus on china s household registration hukou system which favors urban residents and discriminates against rural residents in resource allocation our results show that making individuals hukou identity salient significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students relative to their local urban counterparts on an incentivized cognitive task and consequently significantly lowers their relative ranking in the earnings distribution under the piece rate regime however the impact of hukou identity salience is insignificant in the tournament regime suggesting that its negative effect on migrant students performance may be mitigated when competition is introduced the results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals economic performance and potentially on inequality

gender specific starting point bias in choice experiments evidence from an empirical study abstract in this paper we test whether preferences and willingness to pay estimates obtained in a choice experiment study are susceptible to starting point bias as is often the case in dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies on the basis of a multinomial probit model we find that preferences are indeed susceptible to starting point bias in a split sample design our results suggest that varying the price levels displayed in a so called instructional choice set presented prior to the actual preference eliciting choice sets significantly impacts respondents preferences and willingness to pay for protecting danish nature areas from new motorway development in particular our results show that the bias is gender specific only female respondents are significantly affected results further reveal that the impact of the starting point bias decays as respondents evaluate more and more choice sets this supports the discovered preference hypothesis and on the basis of this we suggest a number of ways to potentially mitigate the starting point bias

mitigating principal agent problems in base of the pyramid markets an identity spillover perspective the potential for profitably distributing products to previously underserved base of the pyramid bop markets as a means of poverty alleviation has received growing interest within the management field however such business models often struggle with the agency costs that arise between the firm and local sales agents as the institutions and infrastructure in bop markets make traditional contractual and monitoring mechanisms difficult and expensive to employ we present the results of two complementary studies which were both conducted with salespeople in rural guatemala the first study employed a quasi experimental field study combined with in depth interviews while the second study was a laboratory experiment the results of the studies suggest that identity based mechanisms can potentially mitigate agency costs through a positive identity spillover effect in multiproduct settings abstract from author

are people inequality averse or just risk averse individuals preferences for risk and inequality are measured through choices between imagined societies and lotteries the median relative risk aversion which is often seen to reflect social inequality aversion is between 2 and 3 most people are also found to be individually inequality averse reflecting a willingness to pay for living in a more equal society left wing voters and women are both more risk and inequality averse than others the model allows for non monotonic swfs implying that welfare may decrease with an individual s income at high income levels which is illustrated in simulations based on the empirical results

globalization and convergence in corporate governance evidence from infosys and the indian software industry in contrast to the much studied role of capital markets in fostering convergence in corporate governance practices worldwide we argue that the globalization of product and talent markets has affected corporate governance of firms in the indian software industry we model several possible reasons why a particular firm infosys has emerged as the exemplar of good corporate governance in india traditionally a backwater of corporate governance practices we further analyze the manner in which infosys has attempted to shape corporate governance practices in india more generally and why these attempts have had limited effects thus far

understanding preferences for income redistribution abstract recent research suggests that income redistribution preferences vary across identity groups we employ statistical learning methods that emphasize pattern recognition classification and regression trees cart and random forests randomforests to uncover what these groups are using data from the general social survey we find that out of a large set of identity markers only race gender age and socioeconomic class are important classifiers for income redistribution preferences further the uncovered identity groupings are characterized by complex patterns of interaction amongst these salient classifiers we explore the extent to which existing theories of income redistribution can explain our results but conclude that current approaches do not fully explain the findings

us and them the origin of identity and its economic implications we investigate the origins of identity and the innate proclivity to draw a distinction between insiders and outsiders we propose an evolutionary explanation we argue that identity arises because it facilitates survival in an evolutionary setting we endogenize preferences and demonstrate that the evolutionarily stable preferences fashioned by natural selection would draw a distinction between insiders and outsiders we then work out the implications of such preferences in two contemporary scenarios one entailing rent seeking behavior and the other involving public good provision our results are in conformity with empirical evidence

a theory of dual labor markets with application to industrial policy discrimination and keynesian unemployment this paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers need to motivate workers in order to elicit effort from their workers employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage this changes fundamentally the character of labor markets the model is applied to a wide range of labor market phenomena it provides a coherent framework for understanding the claims of industrial policy advocates it also can provide the basis for a theory of occupational segregation and discrimination that will not be eroded by market forces finally the model provides the basis for a theory of involuntary unemployment

can gender quotas break down negative stereotypes evidence from changes in electoral rules abstract in this paper we analyze the effect of gender quotas on women s involvement in political activity by using a rich data set providing information on all italian local administrators who were elected from 1985 to 2007 gender quotas were introduced by law in italy in 1993 and were in force until 1995 because of the short period covered by the reform some municipalities never voted under the gender quota regime this allows us to identify a treatment and a control group and to estimate the effects of gender quotas by using a difference in differences estimation strategy our estimates show that women s representation in politics after the reform increased significantly more in municipalities that were affected by the reform than in municipalities that were not affected this result also holds true if we exclude from our analysis elections which took place during the period in which the reform was in force moreover the higher women s representation in gender quota municipalities is not related to the advantages that women who were elected during the reform have obtained from incumbency and does not seem to be driven by differences in temporal trends between southern and northern regions these findings suggest that affirmative actions can be of use in breaking down stereotypes against women

an economist looks at suicide terrorism suicide terrorism has an economic aspect the organisation of a suicide mission requires an incentive a voluntary transaction and a contract that is enforceable by the parties to it a terrorist faction that competes for power in a community that is both oppressed and oppressive provides young people with an incentive to invest in an identity that is rendered more valuable by death suicide attacks are then the outcome of a voluntary agreement between the faction and the young person to trade life for identity the institution of the living martyr renders the agreement privately enforceable thus suicide terrorism is the outcome of an individual rational choice there are some implications for counter measures

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

willingness to pay for renewable energy evidence from a contingent valuation survey in kenya a modern form of energy in particular electricity for household use is an important vehicle in alleviating poverty in developing countries however access and costs of connecting to this service for most poor in these countries is inconceivable policies promoting electricity connection in rural areas are known to be beneficial in improving the socio economic and health well being for households this paper examines willingness to pay wtp for rural electrification connection in kisumu district kenya using the contingent valuation method cvm a nonparametric and a parametric model are employed to estimate wtp values for two electricity products grid electricity ge and photovoltaic pv electricity the results indicate that respondents are willing to pay more for ge services than pv and households favoured monthly connection payments over a lump sum amount some of the policies suggested in this paper include subsidizing the connection costs for both sources of electricity adjusting the payment periods and restructuring the market ownership of providing rural electricity services

social norms savings behavior and growth we argue that many goods and decisions are not allocated or made through markets we interpret an agent s status as a ranking device that determines how well he or she fares in the nonmarket sector the existence of a nonmarket sector can endogenously generate a concern for relative position in for example the income distribution so that higher income implies higher status moreover it can naturally yield multiple equilibria it is thus possible to explain differences in growth rates across countries without recourse to differences in underlying preferences technologies or endowments different social organizations lead to different reduced form preferences which lead to different growth rates

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

cultural identities and resolution of social dilemmas we report an experiment on payoff equivalent sequential provision and appropriation games with high and low caste indian villagers a central question is whether caste identities affect resolution of social dilemmas making caste salient elicits striking changes in behavior compared to baseline treatment with no information about others castes homogenous groups with high caste villagers are more successful in resolving social dilemmas than homogenous groups with low caste villagers the success of mixed caste groups is somewhere between which is inconsistent with a group identity model absent salient information on caste behavior is inconsistent with unconditional social preferences but as predicted by reciprocity jel c93 h41 z13

viewpoint on the generalizability of lab behaviour to the field abstract we can think of no question more fundamental to experimental economics than understanding whether and under what circumstances laboratory results generalize to naturally occurring environments in this paper we extend levitt and list 2006 to the class of games in which financial payoffs and doing the right thing are not necessarily in conflict we argue that behaviour is crucially linked to not only the preferences of people but also the properties of the situation by doing so we are able to provide a road map of the psychological and economic properties of people and situations that might interfere with generalizability of laboratory result from a broad class of games

distributive politics in china regional favouritism and expansion of construction land land conversion control in china remains in the shadow of the planned economy highly hierarchical governments fully control both land quotas and land approval which are indispensable for each add

a model of redistribution under social identification in heterogeneous federations abstract redistribution of resources to accommodate income heterogeneity within a federation is often fiercely debated e g belgium germany or the european union to help elucidate potential drivers behind such debates this article builds on social identity theory to develop a theoretical framework linking jurisdictional identification and preferences towards intra federation redistributive financial flows we show that federal rather than local identification can lead individuals to shift their redistribution preferences against their narrowly defined personal economic interest in contrast to predictions of standard models the sign and strength of this effect depends crucially not only upon individuals characteristics but also upon the social groups i e regions to which they belong we furthermore illustrate that federal rather than regional identification should be more widespread in poorer and or more populous regions within a federation but less common in regions which are very homogeneous internally or very dissimilar from the rest of the federation

identity economics 2016 where do social distinctions and norms come from abstract identity economics provides a framework to analyze economic outcomes by establishing people s identities not just pecuniary incentives as primary motivations for choice the heart of the framework is social difference and norms this paper engages the emerging economic research into sources of divisions and norms individuals families schools governments and social movements the task at hand is to further to develop the micro foundations of identity in order to build a socially framed understandings of human motivation that will yield more robust accounts of behavior and institutions and yet better predictions of the implications of policy

pre marital confinement of women a signaling and matching approach abstract parents in several cultures discipline their daughters to inculcate the supposedly feminine virtues and improve their prospects in the marriage market this process invariably involves imposing restrictions on their behavior movement and social relations we refer to such practices as pre marital confinement and provide a unified game theoretic framework which encompasses the different arguments that have been advanced by social scientists to explain pre marital confinement the proposed framework views confinement by parents as an intrinsically valueless or valuable signal of some unobservable characteristic of their daughters which is valued by men in the marriage market we focus on identifying the conditions that lead to a societal norm of confinement we also show that behind a veil of ignorance where gender is unknown agents will choose to prohibit rather than permit confinement if it is intrinsically valueless and the parameters characterizing the society are such that the ex post equilibrium would involve pooling

cultural constraints on innovation based growth to what extent does the cultural composition of a society impose a constraint on its long run growth potential we study this question in the context of an innovation based model of growth where cultural attitudes are endogenously transmitted from one generation to the next focusing on attitudes regarding patience we analyze the two way interaction between economic growth and the intergenerational transmission of patience exploiting this interaction we compare the long run growth performance of a culturally heterogeneous society where patience is initially underrepresented in the population with a culturally homogeneous society where all agents are perfectly patient our main result is that in the absence of any intrinsic preferences of patient parents to transmit their attitudes to their children the development paths of the two societies are bound to diverge with the culturally heterogeneous society experiencing lower growth rates yet if patient parents ceteris paribus prefer their children to be patient like them we show that the two societies can in the long run grow at the same rate jel d91 e24 o30 o40 z10

gender biases in student evaluations of teaching abstract this article uses data from a french university to analyze gender biases in student evaluations of teaching sets the results of fixed effects and generalized ordered logit regression analyses show that male students express a bias in favor of male professors also the different teaching dimensions that students value in male and female professors tend to match gender stereotypes men are perceived by both male and female students as being more knowledgeable and having stronger class leadership skills which are stereotypically associated with males despite the fact that students appear to learn as much from women as from men

conspicuous conservation the prius halo and willingness to pay for environmental bona fides abstract this paper develops a theory of conspicuous conservation a phenomenon related to conspicuous consumption in which individuals seek status through displays of austerity amid growing concern about environmental protection we identify a statistically and economically significant conspicuous conservation effect in vehicle purchase decisions and estimate a mean willingness to pay for the green signal provided by the distinctively designed toyota prius in the range of 430 4200 depending upon the owner s location results are related to the growing literature on green markets and suggest that policy should target less conspicuous conservation investments that will be under provided relative to those that confer a status benefit

kinship incentives and evolution we analyze how family ties affect incentives with focus on the strategic interaction between two mutually altruistic siblings the siblings exert effort to produce output under uncertainty and they may transfer output to each other with equally altruistic siblings their equilibrium effort is non monotonic in the common degree of altruism and it depends on the harshness of the environment we define a notion of local evolutionary stability of degrees of sibling altruism and show that this degree is lower than the kinship relatedness factor numerical simulations show how family ties vary with the environment and how this a ects economic outcomes

a memoir and reflection knowledge and an evolutionary theory of the multinational firm 10 years later the production of the 1993 article awarded the jibs decade award was written during a time when ideas regarding knowledge and the international expansion of the firm confronted a hostile audience the sources of these ideas were directly related in winter s and roger s prior work but also to a broader literature on category errors and technology transfer the theory of the firm as a social community is a distinctly sociological theory and though sharing many key ideas with the resource based view that developed at the same time is deeply opposed to engineering conceptions of firms as legomodular pieces that can be easily shifted bought and sold we describe our individual biographies and the subsequent intellectual development of the

male female wage differentials in job ladders much of the male female wage differential exists because men and women are assigned to different jobs within narrow job categories there is no male female differential only a tortured taste theory of discrimination can reconcile these facts we argue that differential movement along job ladders entails comparative advantage so the ability standard for promotion is higher for women this implies that more able women will be passed over in favor of less able men women assumed to have the same ability distribution as men earn less the differential reflects females lower promotion probability not within job discrimination

cultural integration and its discontents a community s culture is defined by the preferences and equilibrium behaviours of its members contacts among communities alter individual cultures through two interrelated mechanisms behavioural adaptations driven by pay offs to coordination and preference changes shaped by socialization and self persuasion this paper explores the workings of these mechanisms through a model of cultural integration in which preferences and behaviours vary continuously it identifies a broad set of conditions under which cross cultural contacts promote cultural hybridization the analysis suggests that policies to support social integration serve to homogenize preferences across communities thereby undermining a key objective of multiculturalism yielding fresh insights into strategies pursued to influence cultural trends it also shows that communities benefit from having other communities adjust their behaviours

whose money is it anyway ingroups and distributive behavior abstract price theory is often used to explain reactions to rebates and subsidies that are meant to encourage charitable giving this paper describes the results of a laboratory experiment that tests standard price theory alongside an alternative perspective based on research on the perceptions and behavior of ingroups using a modified dictator game we find that rebates that decrease the price of giving only increase amounts given when they are exogenously funded by the experimenters when rebates are funded by members of one s group the decreased price of giving does not lead to increased amounts given the result suggests that the presence of an ingroup mentality can mediate the relationship between giving and price

the culture of entrepreneurship abstract we study the cultural process through which a society inculcates an entrepreneurial spirit people work for a guaranteed wage or operate a firm whose risky return depends on business expertise the latter is culturally acquired within the family or outside and people may choose an occupation different from the one they were socialized into a cultural bias towards safer occupations from colonial and post colonial policies leads to stagnation where entrepreneurs do not upgrade technology because of their proficiency with existing methods an aggregate productivity shock can tip this economy towards growth led by established businesses a human capital shock where existing business expertise is less useful is more disruptive growth occurs through the emergence of a new class of entrepreneurs we conclude that culture is not destiny it adapts even when some cultural traits do not

homo moralis preference evolution under incomplete information and assortative matching what preferences will prevail in a society of rational individuals when preference evolution is driven by the resulting payoffs we show that when individuals preferences are their private information a convex combination of selfishness and morality stands out as evolutionarily stable we call individuals with such preferences homo moralis a t one end of the spectrum is homo oeconomicus who acts so as to maximize his or her own payoff at the opposite end is homo kantiensis who does what would be the right thing to do in terms of payoffs if all others would do likewise we show that the stable degree of morality the weight placed on the moral goal is determined by the degree of assortativity in the process whereby individuals are matched to interact

historic sex ratio imbalances predict female participation in the market for politicians we analyze the long term effects of gender imbalances on female labor force participation in particular in the market for politicians we exploit variation in sex ratios the number of men divided by the number of women in a region across germany induced by wwii in the 1990 elections women were more likely to run for office in constituencies that had relatively fewer men in 1946 we do not find a significant effect of the sex ratio on the likelihood of a woman winning the election these results suggest that while women were more likely to run for a seat in parliament in constituencies with lower historical sex ratios voters were not more inclined to vote for them voter demand effects thus do not appear to be as strong as candidate supply effects

city structure job search and labour discrimination theory and policy implications we consider a search matching model in which black workers are discriminated against and the job arrival rates of all workers depend on social networks as well as distance to jobs location choices are driven by the racial preferences of households both blacks and whites consciously choosing to trade off proximity to neighbors of similar racial backgrounds for proximity to jobs because of coordination failures in the location choices multiple urban equilibria emerge there is a spatial mismatch equilibrium in which blacks reside far away from jobs and experience high unemployment rates and a spatial match equilibrium in which blacks are closer to jobs and experience lower unemployment rates under some reasonable condition we demonstrate that all workers are better off in the spatial match equilibrium we then consider two policies affirmative action and employment subsidies to the firms which hire black workers we show that the optimal policy requires imposing larger quotas or subsidies in cities in which black workers reside far away from jobs than in cities in which they live closer to jobs

collective trust behavior this paper investigates trust behavior in situations where decision makers are large groups and the decision mechanism is collective theories from behavioral economics and psychology suggest that

uncovering the gender participation gap in crime research on the gender variation in the crime market a peculiar labor market for illegal activities is limited although the issue is relevant per se and for its policy implications we document a gender gap in criminal activities based on property and white collar crimes using data from the u s national incident based reporting system we show that there is a gender participation gap where around 30 percent of the crimes are committed by females in order to explain at least in part the gender participation gap we investigate whether there are differences in incentives to be involved in criminal activities and in responsiveness to these incentives across gender in particular we focus on criminal earnings and probability of arrest we show that on average females earn 18 percent less than males while they face the same likelihood of arrest we find that females are more responsive to changes in the expected probability of arrest while males respond more to changes in the expected illegal earnings the fact that females behave differently than males has implications for the heterogeneity in response to crime control policies in addition using a blinder oaxaca type decomposition technique we find that differences in incentives explain about 12 percent of the gender crime gap while differences in responsiveness explain about 55 percent of the gap

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

presidential address institutions and culture how and why does distant political and economic history shape the functioning of current institutions this paper argues that individual values and convictions about the scope of application of norms of good conduct provide the missing link evidence from a variety of sources points to two main findings first individual values consistent with generalized as opposed to limited morality are widespread in societies that were ruled by non despotic political institutions in the distant past second well functioning institutions are often observed in countries or regions where individual values are consistent with generalized morality and under different identifying assumptions this suggests a causal effect from values to institutional outcomes the paper ends with a discussion of the implications for future research jel a10 d7 e00

energy conservation nudges and environmentalist ideology evidence from a randomized residential electricity field experiment nudges are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation we show that while the electricity conservation nudge of providing feedback to households on own and peers home electricity usage works with liberals it can backfire with conservatives our regression estimates predict that a democratic household that pays for electricity from renewable sources that donates to environmental groups and that lives in a liberal neighborhood reduces its consumption by 3 percent in response to this nudge a republican household that does not pay for electricity from renewable sources and that does not donate to environmental groups increases its consumption by 1 percent

social comparisons status and driving behavior abstract the establishment of desirable social norms is an integral part of a well functioning civil society while recent evidence has demonstrated that social comparison can affect behavior in a variety of contexts it is not clear what type of comparative social information is most effective using a large scale field experiment to study driving practices we sent text messages containing different types of social information to drivers in tsingtao china we find two types of social information to be particularly effective in reducing traffic violations the driving behavior of those similar to oneself and the driving behavior of those with high status cars our results indicate that the combination of descriptive norms with social status is a cost effective yet powerful intervention for establishing better driving behavior in emerging markets

international trade and consumption network externalities abstract this paper studies the effects of trade liberalization in the presence of consumption network externalities the framework is applicable to the choice of network products and sheds light on the debate on globalization and culture in an extended ricardian model of international trade the paper shows that i trade is not pareto inferior to autarky if the free trade equilibrium is unique ii trade is not pareto superior to autarky if both countries are diverse network competition under free trade but can be if each country is homogenous network monopoly iii and when multiple free trade equilibria exist everybody in a country can lose from free trade if that country is homogenous under autarky consumers of imported network goods tend to gain while consumers of exported network goods tend to lose from trade liberalization

individual well being in a dynamic perspective this paper explores the determinants of individual well being as measured by self reported levels of satisfaction with income making full use of the panel data nature of the german socio economic panel we provide empirical evidence for well being depending on absolute and on relative levels of income in a dynamic framework this finding holds after controlling for other influential factors in a multivariate setting the main novelty of the paper is the consideration of dynamic aspects individual s own history as well as the relative income performance with respect to the others living in the society under analysis do play a major role in the assessment of well being

acting wife marriage market incentives and labor market investments do single women avoid career enhancing actions because these actions signal undesirable traits like ambition to the marriage market while married and unmarried female mba students perform similarly when their performance is unobserved by classmates on exams and problem sets unmarried women have lower participation grades in a field experiment single female students reported lower desired salaries and willingness to travel and work long hours on a real stakes placement questionnaire when they expected their classmates to see their preferences other groups responses were unaffected by peer observability a second experiment indicates the effects are driven by observability by single male peers