NEP: New Economics Papers - Social Norms and Social Capital - Digest, Vol 72, Issue 2

In this issue we feature 13 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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  1. Clicking on Heaven's Door: The E ffect of Immigrant Legalization on Crime - Paolo Pinotti
  2. Distrust in Experts and the Origins of Disagreement - Alice Hsiaw; Ing-Haw Cheng
  3. Wage Determination in Social Occupations: the Role of Individual Social Capital - Julie L. Hotchkiss; Anil Rupasingha
  4. Spatial Segregation and Socio-Economic Mobility in European Cities - van Ham, Maarten; Tammaru, Tiit; de Vuijst, Elise; Zwiers, Merle
  5. Reforming the Integration of Refugees: The Swedish Experience - Andersson Joona, Pernilla; Lanninger, Alma W.; Sundström, Marianne
  6. On the Origins of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Sibling Correlations - Lindquist, Matthew J.; Sol, Joeri; van Praag, Mirjam C.; Vladasel, Theodor
  7. Build it and they will come: Volunteer Opportunities and Volunteering - Catherine Deri-Armstrong; Rose Anne Devlin; Forough Seifi
  8. Social interactions between innovating firms: an analytical review of the literature - Johannes VAN DER POL
  9. Lattices in social networks with influence - Michel Grabisch; Agnieszka Rusinowska
  10. Endogenous Growth in Production Networks - Stanislao Gualdi; Antoine Mandel
  11. A Superior Instrument for the Role of Institutional Quality on Economic Development - Elizabeth Gooch; Jorge Martinez-Vazquez; Bauyrzhan Yedgenov
  12. Corporate social responsibility is just a twist in a Möbius Strip: An empirical test on Italian cooperatives - Lopez Arceiz, Francisco; Solferino, Nazaria; Solferino, Viviana; Tortia, Ermanno C.
  13. Bad Company: Reconciling Negative Peer E ects in College Achievement - Ryan R. Brady; Michael Insler; Ahmed S. Rahman

 1. Clicking on Heaven's Door: The E ffect of Immigrant Legalization on Crime

    Paolo Pinotti (Bocconi University)

 We estimate the e ect of immigrant legalization on the crime rate of  immigrants in Italy by exploiting an ideal regression discontinuity design:

 fixed quotas of residence permits are available each year, applications must  be submitted electronically on specific 'Click Days', and are processed on a  first-come, first-served basis until the available quotas are exhausted.

 Matching data on applications with individual- level criminal records, we  show that legalization reduces the crime rate of legalized immigrants by 0.6  percentage points on average, on a baseline crime rate of 1.1 percent.

    Keywords: legal status, crime, regression discontinuity design

    JEL: J61 K37 K42

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:1625&r=soc

 

 2. Distrust in Experts and the Origins of Disagreement

    Alice Hsiaw (Brandeis University)

    Ing-Haw Cheng (Brandeis University)

 Individuals often must learn about a state of the world when both the state  and the credibility of information sources (experts) are uncertain. We argue  that learning in these "rank-deficient" environments may be subject to a bias  that leads agents to over-infer expert quality. Agents who encounter  information or experts in different order disagree about substance because  they endogenously disagree about the credibility of each others' experts, as  first impressions about experts have long-lived influences on beliefs about  the state. This arises even though agents share common priors, information,  and biases, providing a theory for the origins of disagreement. Our theory  helps explain why disagreement about substance and expert credibility often  go hand-in-hand and is hard to resolve in a wide-range of issues where agents  share common information, including economics, climate change, and medicine.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:brd:wpaper:110&r=soc

 

 3. Wage Determination in Social Occupations: the Role of Individual Social Capital

    Julie L. Hotchkiss

    Anil Rupasingha

 We make use of predicted social and civic activities (social capital) to  account for selection into "social" occupations. Individual selection  accounts for more than the total difference in wages observed between social  and non-social occupations. The role that individual social capital plays in  selecting into these occupations and the importance of selection in  explaining wage differences across occupations is similar for both men and  women. We make use of restricted 2000 Decennial Census and 2000 Social  Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Individual social capital is instrumented  by distance weighted surrounding census tract characteristics.

    Keywords: social capital, wage differentials, occupational choice, switching regression, non-public data, factor analysis

    JEL: J31 J24 C34

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cen:wpaper:16-46&r=soc

 

 4. Spatial Segregation and Socio-Economic Mobility in European Cities

    van Ham, Maarten (Delft University of Technology)

    Tammaru, Tiit (University of Tartu)

    de Vuijst, Elise (Delft University of Technology)

    Zwiers, Merle (Delft University of Technology)  Income inequality is increasing in European cities and this rising inequality  has a spatial footprint in cities and neighbourhoods. Poor and rich people  are increasingly living separated and this can threaten the social  sustainability of cities. Low income people, often with an ethnic minority  background, can get cut off from important social networks and mainstream  society, and this can lead to social unrest. Increasing inequality and  socio-economic segregation is therefore a major concern for local and  national governments. Socio-economic segregation is the outcome of a  combination of inequality and poverty, and the spatial organisation of urban  housing markets. Poverty, and living in poverty concentration neighbourhoods  is transmitted between generations and neighbourhood poverty is reproduced  over time through to the residential mobility behaviour of households. Urban  policy often focusses on reducing segregation through physical measures in  cities, such as demolishing houses in deprived neighbourhoods and replacing  them with housing for the middle classes. Such policies will not solve the  underlying causes of segregation, but only redistribute poverty over cities.

 Policy initiatives should first of all focus on reducing inequality by  creating equal opportunities for people and invest in education and training.

 Inclusive growth strategies should combine both people-based and area-based  policy measures.

    Keywords: socio-economic segregation, neighbourhood change, cities, Europe, residential mobility, social mobility, intergenerational mobility

    JEL: D63 D64 I32 J62 P36 P46 R23

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10277&r=soc

 

 5. Reforming the Integration of Refugees: The Swedish Experience

    Andersson Joona, Pernilla (SOFI, Stockholm University)

    Lanninger, Alma W. (SOFI, Stockholm University)

    Sundström, Marianne (SOFI, Stockholm University)  In this paper we evaluate the Swedish Establishment Reform, carried out in

 2010 with the goal of speeding up the establishment of refugees and their  family. From December 1, 2010 the reform transferred the responsibility for  the integration of newly‐arrived refugees from the municipalities to the  government funded Public Employment Service through which those eligible  should get establishment talks, individual plans and coaches. The Reform was  motivated by concern over the low employment level and slow integration of  refugees. Our approach is to compare the outcomes of the Treatment group,  which took part in establishment activities and arrived between December 1,

 2010 and December 31, 2011, to those of the Comparison group, which arrived  in the eleven months preceding the Reform and participated in municipal  introduction programs, controlling for a rich set of observables, including  country of birth and month of residence permit. Outcomes are measured in  terms of employment and earnings in 2012, 2013 and 2014 for the Treatment  group and in 2011, 2012 and 2013 for the Comparison group. Our data comes  from registers held by Statistics Sweden and covers all immigrants. The  results suggest positive and significant effects of the Reform. In the second  year after program‐start the Treatment group had about 5.7 percent higher  probability of employment and in the third year about 7.5 percent higher. The  effects on earnings were larger, about 20 percent higher earnings for the  Treatment group after the second year and about 22 percent higher after the  third year.

    Keywords: integration, refugees, labor market policy, treatment effect, employment, earnings, caseworkers

    JEL: J15 J61 J68

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10307&r=soc

 

 6. On the Origins of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Sibling Correlations

    Lindquist, Matthew J. (SOFI, Stockholm University)

    Sol, Joeri (University of Amsterdam)

    van Praag, Mirjam C. (Copenhagen Business School)

    Vladasel, Theodor (Copenhagen Business School)  Promoting entrepreneurship has become an increasingly important part of the  policy agenda in many countries. The success of such policies, however, rests  in part on the assumption that entrepreneurship outcomes are not fully  determined at a young age by factors that are unrelated to current policy. We  test this assumption and assess the importance of family background and  neighborhood effects as determinants of entrepreneurship, by estimating  sibling correlations in entrepreneurship. We find that between 20 and 50  percent of the variance in different entrepreneurial outcomes is explained by  factors that siblings share (i.e., family background and neighborhood  effects). The average is 28 percent. Hence, entrepreneurship is far less than  fully determined at a young age. Our estimates increase only a little when  allowing for differential treatment within families by gender and birth  order. We then investigate a comprehensive set of mechanisms that explain  sibling similarities. Parental entrepreneurship plays a large role in  explaining sibling similarities, as do shared genes. We show that  neighborhood effects matter, but are rather small, particularly when compared  with the overall importance of family factors. Sibling peer effects, and  parental income and education matter even less.

    Keywords: entrepreneurship, family background, intergenerational persistence, neighborhood effects, occupational choice, sibling

     correlations

    JEL: D13 J62 L26

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10278&r=soc

 

 7. Build it and they will come: Volunteer Opportunities and Volunteering

    Catherine Deri-Armstrong (Department of Economics, University of Ottawa,

     Ottawa, ON)

    Rose Anne Devlin (Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa,

     ON)

    Forough Seifi (Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON)  Formal volunteering takes place on behalf of charitable or non-profit  organizations. While the physical presence of these organizations is usually  required for citizens who want to volunteer, the physical presence of  charitable organizations varies from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Until  now, no one has examined the role of charity proximity on volunteer  decisions. In this paper we use information on the location of registered  charities in Canada merged with survey information on the location of  individuals and their volunteering decisions to examine how the physical  proximity of charities (‘Access’) affects volunteer behaviour. Careful  attention is paid to the possibility that the measure of access might be

 endogenous: organizations and volunteers may respond to the same unobservable  factors when deciding where to locate. Our results imply that access does  matter for the decision to volunteer as well as for the amount of time  devoted to volunteering: increasing the number of charitable organizations  within a one-kilometre buffer around an individual’s place of residence by 1%  increases the predicted probability of volunteering by 0.9%. We find that the  impact of an additional charity on the likelihood of volunteering decreases  with distance to the individual’s residence, suggesting that the location of  charities, indeed, matters when it comes to influencing volunteering behavior.

    Keywords: Volunteer, Geo-coding, Endogeneity, Proximity to charities, Charitable organizations

    JEL: R12 H49

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ott:wpaper:1615e&r=soc

 

 8. Social interactions between innovating firms: an analytical review of the literature

    Johannes VAN DER POL

 The main objective of this paper is to offer an analytical review of the  literature focusing on the link between collaboration and performance. More  precisely, the paper analyses the impact the position of the firm in the  network has on the performance of the firm. Evolving in an innovation network  implies that the firm is exposed to knowledge flows from collaborators. They  are also exposed to the diffusion of their reputation through their partners.

 This document summarizes the different factors that have an impact on the  manner in which firms can profit from their network and how, in their turn,  they can impact the network.

    Keywords: Innovation networks ; Performance ; Knowledge ; Collaboration

    JEL: L14 D83

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grt:wpegrt:2016-23&r=soc

 

 9. Lattices in social networks with influence

    Michel Grabisch (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université

     Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,

     PSE - Paris School of Economics)

    Agnieszka Rusinowska (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 -

     Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche

     Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics)  We present an application of lattice theory to the framework of influence in  social networks. The contribution of the paper is not to derive new results,  but to synthesize our existing results on lattices and influence. We consider  a two-action model of influence in a social network in which agents have to  make their yes-no decision on a certain issue. Every agent is preliminarily  inclined to say either 'yes' or 'no', but due to influence by others, the  agent's decision may be different from his original inclination. We discuss  the relation between two central concepts of this model: influence function  and follower function. The structure of the set of all influence functions  that lead to a given follower function appears to be a distributive lattice.

 We also consider a dynamic model of influence based on aggregation functions  and present a general analysis of convergence in the model. Possible terminal  classes to which the process of influence may converge are terminal states  (the consensus states and non trivial states), cyclic terminal classes and  unions of Boolean lattices.

    Keywords: convergence,terminal class,aggregation function,Influence function,follower function,distributive lattice

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00977005&r=soc

 

10. Endogenous Growth in Production Networks

    Stanislao Gualdi (Ecole Centrale Supélec - Laboratoire MAS)

    Antoine Mandel (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne - Paris School of

     Economics)

 We investigate the interplay between technological change and macroeconomic  dynamics in an agent-based model of the formation of production networks. On  the one hand, production networks form the structure that determines economic  dynamics in the short run. On the other hand, their evolution reflects the  long-term impacts of competition and innovation on the economy. We account  for process innovation via increasing variety in the input mix and hence  increasing connectivity in the network. In turn, product innovation induces a  direct growth of the firm's productivity and the potential destruction of  links. The interplay between both processes generate complex technological  dynamics in which phases of process and product innovation successively  dominate. The model reproduces a wealth of stylized facts about industrial  dynamics and technological progress, in particular the persistence of  heterogeneity among firms and Wright's law for the growth of productivity  within a technological paradigm. We illustrate the potential of the model for  the analysis of industrial policy via a preliminary set of policy experiments  in which we investigate the impact on innovators' success of feed-in tariffs  and of priority market access

    Keywords: Production network; Network formation; Scale-free networks;

     Firms demographics; distribution of firms' size; Zipf law; General

     equilibrium; monopolistic competition; disequilibrium

    JEL: D57 D85 L16

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:16054&r=soc

 

11. A Superior Instrument for the Role of Institutional Quality on Economic Development

    Elizabeth Gooch (USDA Economics Research)

    Jorge Martinez-Vazquez (International Center for Public Policy. Andrew

     Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University)

    Bauyrzhan Yedgenov (Department of Economics, International Center for

     Public Policy. Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State

     University)

 This paper reexamines the causal link between institutional quality and  economic development using "Malaria Endemicity" as an instrument for  institutions. This instrument is superior to the previously used instruments  in the literature which suffered from measurement error, including "settler  mortality." Because the Malaria Endemicity measure captures the malaria  environment before the discovery that mosquitoes transmit the disease and  before the successful eradication efforts that followed, it is exogenous to  both institutional quality and economic development. We find Malaria  Endemicity a valid strong instrument which yields larger significant effects  of institutions on economic development than those obtained in the previous  literature.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper1610&r=soc

 

12. Corporate social responsibility is just a twist in a Möbius Strip: An empirical test on Italian cooperatives.

    Lopez Arceiz, Francisco

    Solferino, Nazaria

    Solferino, Viviana

    Tortia, Ermanno C.

 In order to devise a new cost-benefit function, in this work we apply in a  Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) context the electro-magnetism  geometrical model of the Möbius Strip, which analyzes how the moves of  electrons produce energy. Similarly to the case of electrons tunneling in the  strip, we highlight three positive crossed effects on firm performance  originating from: i) cooperation within the same group of stakeholders; ii)  cooperation between different groups of stakeholders; iii) stakeholders'

 loyalty towards the company. By applying this new cost-benefit function to a  firms' decision making processes we evidence that investing in CSR activities  is always convenient depending on the number of stakeholder groups, on  stakeholders' sensitivity to CSR investments and on the decay rate to  alienation. We test these findings through Structural Equation Modelling by  exploiting a unique dataset including data on 4135 workers in a matched  sample of 320 Italian social enterprises. Results show that CSR is, in all  specifications of the model, the strongest determinant of firm performance in  terms of improvement in service quality and worker achieved professional and  personal growth. Direct effects of CSR on performance are added to indirect  effects mediated by cooperation and reduced worker alienation in terms of  higher job satisfaction.

    Keywords: Corporate social responsibility, Econophysics, Firm Behavior, Structural Equations Modelling

    JEL: C3 D21 L13 Z1

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:74776&r=soc

 

13. Bad Company: Reconciling Negative Peer E ects in College Achievement

    Ryan R. Brady (United States Naval Academy)

    Michael Insler (United States Naval Academy)

    Ahmed S. Rahman (United States Naval Academy)  Existing peer e ects studies produce contradictory findings, including  positive, negative, large, and small effects, despite similar contexts. We  reconcile these results using U.S. Naval Academy data covering a 22-year  history of the random assignment of students to peer groups. Coupled with  students' limited discretion over freshman-year courses, our setting affords  an opportunity to better understand peer effects in different social  networks. We find negative effects at the broader "company" level--students'

 social and residential group--and positive effects at the narrower  course-company level. We suggest that peer spillovers change direction  because of differences in the underlying mechanism of peer infl uence.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:usn:usnawp:51&r=soc


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14th PASCAL International Observatory Conference - South Africa

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