NEP: New Economics Papers - Social Norms and Social Capital - 03-12-2014

Date:

2013-09

By:

Manuel Förster (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - CNRS : UMR8174 - Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne, CORE - Center of Operation Research and Econometrics [Louvain] - Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) - Belgique)
Ana Mauleon (CORE - Center of Operation Research and Econometrics [Louvain] - Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) - Belgique, CEREC - Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles)
Vincent Vannetelbosch (CORE - Center of Operation Research and Econometrics [Louvain] - Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) - Belgique, CEREC - Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00881145&r=soc [2]

We investigate the role of manipulation in a model of opinion formation where agents have opinions about some common question of interest. Agents repeatedly communicate with their neighbors in the social network, can exert some effort to manipulate the trust of others, and update their opinions taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. The incentives to manipulate are given by the agents' preferences. We show that manipulation can modify the trust structure and lead to a connected society, and thus, make the society reaching a consensus. Manipulation fosters opinion leadership, but the manipulated agent may even gain influence on the long-run opinions. In sufficiently homophilic societies, manipulation accelerates (slows down) convergence if it decreases (increases) homophily. Finally, we investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation. We find that if the ability of the manipulating agent is weak and the agents underselling (overselling) their information gain (lose) overall influence, then manipulation reduces misinformation and agents converge jointly to more accurate opinions about some underlying true state.

Keywords:

Social networks; trust; manipulation; opinion leadership; consensus; wisdom of crowds

Date:

2014-11-03

By:

Ljunge, Martin (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN))

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1046&r=soc [3]

This paper presents evidence that generalized trust promotes health. Children of immigrants in a broad set of European countries with ancestry from across the world are studied. Individuals are examined within country of residence using variation in trust across countries of ancestry. There is a significant positive estimate of ancestral trust in explaining selfassessed health. The finding is robust to accounting for individual, parental, and extensive ancestral country characteristics. Individuals with higher ancestral trust are also less likely to be hampered by health problems in their daily life, providing evidence of trust influencing real life outcomes. Individuals with high trust feel and act healthier, enabling a more productive life.

Keywords:

Trust; Social capital; Self assessed health; Subjective health; Self reported health; Cultural transmission; Children of immigrants

JEL:

D13 D83 I12 Z13

Date:

2014-10-06

By:

H Peyton Young

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oxf:wpaper:726&r=soc [4]

Social norms are patterns of behavior that are self-enforcing at the group level: everyone wants to conform when they expect everyone else to conform.  There are multiple mechanisms that sustain social norms, including a desire to coordinate, fear of being sanctioned, signaling membership in the group, or simply following the lead of others.  This article shows how stochastic evolutionary game theory can be used to study the dynamics of norms.  We illustrate with a variety of examples drawn from economics, sociology, demography, and political science.  These include bargaining norms, norms governing the terms of contracts, norms of retirement, duelling, footbinding, medical treatment, and the use of contraceptives.  These cases highlight the challenges of applying the theory to empirical cases.  They also show that the modern theory of norm dynamics yields insights and predictions that go beyond conventional equilibrium analysis.

Keywords:

evolutionary game theory, equilibrium selection, stochastic stability

JEL:

C73 A12 O10

Date:

2014

By:

Lars Kunze
Nicolai Suppa

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp703&r=soc [5]

This article examines the impact of unemployment on social participation for Germany using the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find significant negative, robust and, for some activities, lasting effects of unemployment on social participation. Causality is established by focussing on plant closures as exogenous entries into unemployment. Social norms, labor market prospects and the perception of individual failure are shown to be relevant for explaining these findings. Furthermore, our results not only (i) provide novel insights into the determinants of the unemployed's unhappiness but also (ii) highlight an hitherto unexplored channel through which unemployment influences economic outcomes, namely by altering the long-run level of social capital, and (iii) point to an alternative explanation of unemployment hysteresis based on access to information.

Keywords:

Unemployment, social participation, plant closure, fixed effects, well-being

JEL:

J64 I31

Date:

2014-09

By:

Heineck, Guido (University of Bamberg)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8496&r=soc [6]

There is a long tradition in psychology, the social sciences and, more recently though, economics to hypothesize that religion enhances prosocial behavior. Evidence from both survey and experimental data however yield mixed results and there is barely any evidence for Germany. This study adds to this literature by exploring data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which provides both attitudinal (importance of helping others, of being socially active) and behavioral components of prosociality (volunteering, charitable giving and blood donations). Results from analyses that avoid issues of reverse causality suggest mainly for moderate, positive effects of individuals' religious involvement as measured by church affiliation and church attendance. Despite the historic divide in religion, results in West and East Germany do not differ substantially.

Keywords:

religion, prosocial behavior, Germany

JEL:

D64 Z12 Z13

Date:

2014

By:

Johny, Judit
Wichmann, Bruno
Swallow, Brent

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:aaea14:170357&r=soc [7]

Rural households in developing countries adopt diversification of income sources as a common strategy to stabilize their income throughout the year. We view social networks as an important factor that influences diversification activities. Social interactions may help households to gain ideas, skills, services and information which could influence their decision to diversify their income sources.This paper examines whether household’s social networks influence income diversification in Wayanad District of South India. We develop a network econometric model based on a Spatial Autoregressive econometric approach by replacing the spatial matrix with a network matrix. Our results indicate that the diversification of a household’s social network has a statistically significant positive effect on its income diversification.

Keywords:

Income Diversification, Social Networks, Rural Housheholds, International Development

Date:

2014-08

By:

Brunner, Beatrice (Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW))
Kuhn, Andreas (Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8409&r=soc [8]

We combine community-level outcomes of 27 votes about immigration issues in Switzerland with census data to estimate the effect of immigration on natives' attitudes towards immigration. We apply an instrumental variable approach to take potentially endogenous locational choices into account, and we categorize immigrants into two groups according to the cultural values and beliefs of their source country to understand how the cultural distance between natives and immigrants affects this relationship. We find that the share of culturally different immigrants is a significant and sizable determinant of anti-immigration votes, while the presence of culturally similar immigrants does not affect natives' voting behavior at all in most specifications. The cultural distance between immigrant and native residents thus appears crucial in explaining the causal effect of immigration on natives' attitudes towards immigration, and we argue that the differential impact is mainly driven by natives' concerns about compositional amenities. We finally show that the elasticity of the share of right-wing votes in favor of the Swiss People's Party is much more elastic with respect to the share of culturally different immigrants than natives' attitudes themselves, suggesting that the party has disproportionally gained from changes in attitudes caused by immigrant inflows.

Keywords:

instrumental variable, endogenous residential choice, cultural distance, cultural values and beliefs, voting behavior, attitudes towards immigration, immigration, rightwing votes

JEL:

D72 F22 J15 J61 R23