Date:

2013-12

By:

Fabio Sabatini
Francesco Sarracino

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usi:wpaper:692&r=soc

Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social participation. Our study adds to this body of research by conducting the first empirical assessment of how online networking affects two economically relevant aspects of social capital, i.e. trust and sociability. We find that participation in SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter has a positive effect on face to face interactions. However, social trust decreases with online interactions. Several interpretations of these findings are discussed.

Keywords:

social participation; online networks; Facebook; Internet-mediated communication; social capital; broadband; digital divide

JEL:

C36 D85 O33 Z13

Date:

2014-04-09

By:

Gren, Ing-Marie (Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)
Andersson Franko, Mikael (Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)
Holstein, Fredrik (Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:slueko:2014_004&r=soc

This paper developed a simple dynamic model in order to analyse the impact of social capital on violation of environmental regulations. Two main channels of influence were identified; through informal enforcement of regulations and through effects on costs from disinvestment in social capital caused by violation. The model was tested using survey data on enforcement and violation of command and control regulations at municipalities and counties in Sweden. Four different measures on the social capital variable were used; general trust, trust in local and national governments, and organizational activity. Count data models were used for estimating the explanatory power of these variables in relation to inspection frequency and control variables of community characteristics. Statistically best results were obtained for organizational activity for all firm categories. The results showed that both the level of this social capital measure and its growth over time curb violation.

Keywords:

social capital; violation of environmental regulations; econometric test; count data model; Sweden

JEL:

K33 K42 Q58

Date:

2014-04-11

By:

Bjornskov, Christian
Bogetic, Zeljko
Hillman, Arye
Popovic, Milenko

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:95968&r=soc

The principal focus in the substantial literature on impediments to economic development has been on the inadequacies of policies and governance. However, successful economic development requires effectiveness of markets and incentives for investment, which in turn require trust. This paper reports on trust in a development context. The paper uses trust experiments, a post-experiment survey, and econometric analysis relating trust to identity and other personal attributes in the setting of Montenegro, a small, recently-independent, post-socialist, post-crisis society. External validity was sought by providing sufficient material reward to balance identity-related expressive motives and by having two groups of subjects, one usual university students and another group that, while also students, was somewhat older and had had greater market or ommercial experience. The paper reviews cultural priors that can be expected to affect trust and distinguishes between generalized trust that can be socially beneficial and particularized trust that can be disadvantageous for development. The empirical results suggest that trust among private individuals is not an impediment to development in Montenegro. As a result, policy reform can improve economic and social outcomes. However, the results redirect the focus to issues of governance and political entrenchment as potential explanations for impediments to development. --

Keywords:

particularized trust,Generalized trust,identity,trust game,trust experiment,betrayal aversion,expressive behavior,political entrenchment,Montenegro

JEL:

D03 O12 P16 Z13

Date:

2014

By:

Julia Hauberer (University of Hamburg - School of Business Administration)
Alexander Tatarko (National Research University Higher School of Economics)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:38/soc/2014&r=soc

This article deals with the influence of cultural background on the sources of social capital. We analyse four different culture groups – Czechs and Russians representing post-modernized cultures and Dagestanis and Chechens representing traditional cultures. Applying univariate comparisons and Structural Equation Modelling, our results indicate a clear difference between post-modern and traditional cultures. Postmodernity seems to come along with less family network density and greater formal network size; however, also with higher family social capital access than traditionalism. No clear distinction can be drawn regarding size of friendship network and social capital accessed by the friendship network.

Keywords:

individual social capital, social networks, culture, modernization, tradition, resource generator

JEL:

D85

Date:

2014-04

By:

Giulietti, Corrado (IZA)
Wahba, Jackline (University of Southampton)
Zenou, Yves (Stockholm University)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8089&r=soc

This paper studies the role of strong versus weak ties in the rural-to-urban migration decision in China. We first develop a network model that puts forward the different roles of weak and strong ties in helping workers to migrate to the city. We then use a unique longitudinal data that allows us to test our model by focusing on first-time migration. Strong ties are measured by the closest family contact, while weak ties are determined by the fraction of migrants from the village in which the individual resides. We address the endogeneity of the network formation in the migration decision. Our results indicate that both weak and strong ties matter in the migration decision process, although the impact of weak ties is higher than that of strong ties. We also show that one underestimates the effect of social networks on migration by not taking into account the strong ties in the mobility process. We finally find that weak and strong ties act as complements in the migration decision, which indicates that the interactive effect between weak and strong ties is particularly strong above a certain threshold of the size of weak ties.

Keywords:

social networks, internal migration, China

JEL:

O15 J61

Date:

2014-03

By:

Fiorillo, D.;
Nappo, N.;

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:yor:hectdg:14/05&r=soc

In this paper we compare the correlation among formal and informal volunteering and self-perceived health across 14 European countries after controlling for socio-economic characteristics, housing features, neighborhood quality, size of municipality, social participation and regional dummies. we find that formal volunteering has a significantly positive association with self-perceived health in Finland and the Netherlands, but none in the other countries. By contrast, informal volunteering has a significantly positive correlation with self-perceived health in the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal and Greece, and a significantly negative relationship in Italy. Our conclusion is that formal and informal volunteering measure two different aspects of volunteering whose correlations with perceived health seem to depend on specific cultural and institutional characteristics of each country.

Keywords:

Attrition; self-perceived health, formal and informal volunteering, European countries

JEL:

I10 P5 Z1

Date:

2014-04-05

By:

Bruna Bruno
Damiano Fiorillo

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eei:rpaper:eeri_rp_2014_05&r=soc

The effects of voluntary work on earnings have recently been studied for some developed countries such as Canada, France and Austria. This paper extends this line of research to Italy, using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset. A double methodological approach is used in order to control for unobserved heterogeneity: Heckman and IV methods are employed to account for unobserved worker heterogeneity and endogeneity bias. Empirical results show that, when the unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account, a wage premium of 2.7 percent emerges, quite small if compared to previous investigations on Canada and Austria. The investigation into the channels of influence of volunteering on wages gives support to the hypotheses that volunteering enables the access to fruitful informal networks, avoids the human capital deterioration and provides a signal for intrinsically motivated individuals.

Keywords:

Voluntary work, wages, Mincer equation, selection bias, instrumental variables, Italy.

JEL:

C31 C36 J31

Date:

2014

By:

Dhillon, Amrita (Kings College, London)
Peeters, Ronald (Maastrict)
Muge Yukse, Ayse (Maastrict)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:183&r=soc

The use of social networks in the workplace has been documented by many authors, although the reasons for their widespread prevalence are less well known. In this paper we present evidence based on a lab experiment that suggests quite strongly that social networks are used by employers to reduce worker moral hazard. We capture moral hazard with a dictator game between the referrer and worker. The worker chooses how much to return under dierent settings of social proximity. Social proximity is captured using Facebook friendship information gleaned anonymously from subjects once they have been recruited. Since employers themselves do not have access to social connections, they delegate the decision to referrers who can select among workers with dierent degrees of social proximity to themselves. We show that employers choose referrals over anonymous hiring relatively more when they know that the referrer has access to friends, and are willing to delegate more often when the social proximity between referrer and worker is potentially higher. In keeping with this expectation, referrers also choose workers with a greater social proximity to themselves and workers who are closer to referrers indeed pay back more to the referrer. The advantage of the lab setting is that we can isolate directed altruism as the only reason for these results.

Keywords:

Eciency wage contracts, Moral hazard, Dictator game, Referrals, Altruism, Reciprocity, Directed altruism, Social proximity, Facebook, Experiment, Social networks, Strength of ties, Spot market.

Date:

2013

By:

Proto, Eugenio (University of Warwick)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:143&r=soc

Cooperating and trusting behavior may be explained by preferences over social outcomes (people care about others, are unselfish and help- ful), or attitudes to work and social responsibilities (plans have to be carried out, norms have to be followed). If the first hypothesis is true, Agreeable- ness, reporting stated empathy for others, should matter most; if the second, higher score in traits expressing attitude to work, intrinsic motivation (Con- scientiousness) should be correlated with cooperating behavior and trust. We find experimental support for the second hypothesis when subjects provide real mental effort in two treatments with identical task, differing by whether others' payment is affected.

Keywords:

Personality Traits, Cooperation, Effort Provision

Date:

2013-08-01

By:

Julie Beugnot
Bernard Fortin
Guy Lacroix
Marie-Claire Villeval

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cir:cirwor:2013s-27&r=soc

This paper extends the standard work effort model by allowing workers to interact through networks. We investigate experimentally whether peer performances and peer contextual effects influence individual performances. Two types of network are considered. Participants in Recursive networks are paired with participants who played previously in isolation. In Simultaneous networks, participants interact in real-time along an undirected line. Mean peer effects are identified in both cases. Individual performances increase with peer performances in the recursive network. In the simultaneous network, endogenous peer effects vary according to gender: they are large for men but not statistically different from zero for women.

Keywords:

Peer effects, social networks, work effort, piece rate, experiment.,

JEL:

C91 J16 J24 J31 M52

Date:

2014

By:

Bicskei, Marianna
Lankau, Matthias
Bizer, Kilian

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cegedp:200&r=soc

This article analyzes how the anticipation of peer-punishment affects cooperativeness in the provision of public goods under social identity. For this purpose we conduct one-shot public good games with induced social identity and implement in-group, out-group and random matching protocols. Our measure of cooperativeness is subjects' conditional contribution elicited via the strategy method, which allows for observing behavior contingent on every possible level of group members' cooperation. We demonstrate, firstly, that the social environment is a determinant of how the threat of peer-punishment influences cooperation. The strongest increase is clearly evident when subjects interact with members of different identities, which is especially the case for individuals who were initially categorized as freeriders. Secondly, anticipation of peer-punishment clearly eliminates the typically existing ingroup bias without punishment and renders out-group members to be as cooperative as ingroups members. Lastly, the results indicate that the institutions of peer-punishment and social identity may be complemented in order to raise subjects' cooperativeness. --

JEL:

C92 D03 D73 H41

Date:

2014-01

By:

Apouey, B.;
Picone, G.;

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:yor:hectdg:14/06&r=soc

This paper examines the existence of social interactions in malaria preventive behaviors in Sub-Saharan Africa, i.e. whether an individual's social environment has an influence on the individual's preventive behaviors. We focus on the two population groups which are the most vulnerable to malaria (children under 5 and pregnant women) and on two preventive behaviors (sleeping under a bednet and taking intermittent preventive treatment during pregnancy). We define the social environment of the individual as people living in the same region. To detect social interactions, we calculate the size of the social multiplier by comparing the effects of anexogenous variable at the individual level and at the regional level. Our data come from 92 surveys for 29 Sub-Saharan countries between 1999 and 2012, and they cover approximately 660,000 children and 95,000 women. Our results indicate that social interactions are important in malaria preventive behaviors, since the social mulitpliers for women's education and household wealth are greater than one - which means that education and wealth generates larger effects on preventive behaviors in the long run than we would expect from the individual-level specifications, once we account for social interactions.

Keywords:

social interactions; social multiplier; malaria preventive behavior;

JEL:

I12

Date:

2014

By:

Bicskei, Marianna
Lankau, Matthias
Bizer, Kilian

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cegedp:203&r=soc

Several studies have shown that social identity fosters the provision of public goods and enhances the willingness to reciprocate cooperative behavior of group members dependent on the social environment. Yet, the question of how social identity affects negative reciprocity in identityhomogeneous and -heterogeneous groups has received only little attention. Consequently, we seek to fill this gap by examining whether social identity affects individuals' willingness to sanction deviating group members in a public good context. Moreover, we devote particular attention to the role of anger-like emotions in negative reciprocity. To test our hypotheses we employ one-shot public good games in strategy method with induced social identity. Our results indicate that members of identity homogeneous groups punish much less often and in smaller amounts than of identity heterogeneous groups when they face contributions smaller than their own. We also find that anger-like emotions influence punishment behavior much stronger when individuals are matched with members of different identities than in identity homogenous groups. These findings contribute to the better understanding of the nature of social identity and its impact on reciprocity, improving economists ability to predict behavior taking emotions also into consideration. --

Keywords:

social identity,emotions,experiment,public goods,negative reciprocity

Date:

2013

By:

Gupta, Bishnupriya (University of Warwick)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cge:wacage:111&r=soc

Industrial investment in Colonial India was segregated by the export oriented industries, such as tea and jute that relied on British firms and the import substituting cotton textile industry that was dominated by Indian firms. The literature emphasizes discrimination against Indian capital. Instead informational factors played an important role. British entrepreneurs knew the export markets and the Indian entrepreneurs were familiar with the local markets. The divergent flows of entrepreneurship can be explained by the comparative advantage enjoyed by social groups in information and the role of social networks in determining entry and creating separate spheres of industrial investment.

Date:

2014

By:

Anastasiia V. Rassadovskaia
Andrey V. Aistov (National Research University Higher School of Economics)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:57/ec/2014&r=soc

The efficiency of social reforms in different countries mostly depends on the extent to which they can be accepted by the population. However, even if problems are similar, the reasons may differ, which can make it difficult to apply existing laws of one state to another. Bribery is a typical problem for developing countries as shown in the Corruption Perception Index (calculated by Transparency International) and recent research (Levin and Satarov, 2000) (Ilzetzki, 2011). Corruption can have roots in socialist regimes as in recently established political stability instable economic situation may lead to growth in crime. The main challenge within the scope of this project is to identify the relation between corruption perception and levels of trust in society and to distinguish the differences in factors affecting these characteristics. The research reveals that distrust matters a lot for the problem in Russia and suggests further examination of the dynamics of trust between post Soviet countries and European countries.

Keywords:

corruption perceptions, grassroots corruption, IV logit, Russia, RLMS, social capital

JEL:

C35 D73 P37

Date:

2014-03

By:

Ado, Akifumi
Kurosaki, Takashi

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hit:primdp:53&r=soc

We implemented laboratory experiments in Jakarta, Indonesia, to identify motives for sharing, including baseline altruism, directed altruism, sanction aversion, and reciprocity. The study area is located on the periphery of the Metropolis of Jakarta, many of whose residents are migrants and are closely connected with informal institutions such as Arisan, a rotating savings and credit association in Indonesia. Using data from sample households, the experimental results show that transfers based on baseline altruism accounted for the largest amount.Because the difference in the transferred amounts arising from the revelation of dictators' identities was statistically insignificant, we combined the four motives into two: preference-related motives (baseline and directed altruism) and incentive-related motives (sanction aversion and reciprocity) for the examination of their association with real world behavior regarding sharing. The empirical results suggest the importance of incentive-related motives in explaining variations in the amount of income transfers received from and sent to others.

Keywords:

sharing, altruism, reciprocity, network, experimental economics

JEL:

O17 C92 D03 D64

Date:

2014-04

By:

Giovanni Vaia (Dept. of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venice)
Anna Moretti (Dept. of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venice)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vnm:wpdman:77&r=soc

In an over-connected world where ICTs dominate firms' development and evolution, outsourcing is an increasingly adopted practice by IT firms facing a third-generation of inter-firm interactions: after the IT and business processes' outsourcing, and then the offshore outsourcing, now we face a sourcing ecosystem tagged as human cloud, where the online work and virtual workers are the center of the new system. Notwithstanding some relevant contributions to the literature about IT outsourcing, still few is known about how coordination between client and supplier can achieve superior outcomes through the development of collaborative practices. In particular, the use of IT tools devoted to sociality as a coordination mechanism has been under-investigated. This research provides insights about how a company can change attitudes and behaviors of client and supplier thanks to an IT tool deputed to collaboration: the social collaboration system. Through an explorative case study, our paper provides two main contributions to the literature about IT outsourcing: i) we show how the adoption of a social collaboration system improves ITO governance and performance, providing further empirical evidence on the role of social mechanisms in ITO relationships; ii) we show how the introduction of a social collaboration system in outsourcing management can influence and change the building blocks of its life-cycle.

Keywords:

IT outsourcing, governance, social collaboration, relational view, outsourcing lifecycle

JEL:

L24 M55

Date:

2014

By:

Koschatzky, Knut
Schnabl, Esther
Zenker, Andrea
Stahlecker, Thomas
Kroll, Henning

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:fisifr:r42014&r=soc

This paper addressed the need for research regarding the role of associations in innovation systems. As defined here, the term association embraces not only organisations like business associations, but all actors who associate to pursue joint objectives and positively influence their (regional) innovation system. In the innovation system's perspective, these associations perform intermediary functions. As the relevant activities are often initiated by individuals acting in specific environments and circumstances, we need to consider not only the level of the organisation (i.e. meso level), but also the macro level of the innovation system and the micro level of individuals. Against the background of economic and social theory, intrinsic motivations have therefore also been discussed. External conditions, like the mode of governance and the logic of influence are also relevant as these define the framework conditions. Over time, associations may evolve in line with changes in the environment and internal developments. This evolution can be regarded as a life cycle which is specific to each association. Different types of associations and their specific functions have been mentioned using the example of Germany. While each of the listed associations can be regarded as an individual case, we can also assume that there are certain traits which are shared by all of them. Thus, we proposed four hypotheses addressing the macro level, i.e. the level of the regional innovation system, the meso level, i.e. the level of the association, and the micro level, which considers the motivations of individuals. We further proposed an empirical concept to be applied to study the role of associations in innovation systems. --