In this issue we feature 7 current papers on the theme of social capital:

This issue is sponsored by NIPE. It is announcing its 14th Summer School on “Advances in Quantile Regression”, taught by Professor Roger Koenker of the University of Illinois, at the University of Minho, from June 12 to June 14 2017.

Find out more at http://www3.eeg.uminho.pt/economia/nipe/summerschool2017/

Access to full contents may be restricted. To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link: http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options.

1. War, Inflation, and Social Capital - Sergei Guriev; Nikita Melnikov
2. Roots of Autocracy - Oded Galor; Marc Klemp
3. Institutions vs. Social Interactions in Driving Economic Convergence: Evidence from Colombia - Coscia, Michelle; Cheston, Timothy; Hausmann, Ricardo
4. Voting and Contributing While the Group is Watching - Emeric Henry; Charles Louis-Sidois
5. Cooperating Over Losses and Competing Over Gains: a Social Dilemma Experiment - Ispano, Alessandro; Schwardmann, Peter
6. One Mandarin Benefits the Whole Clan: Hometown Favoritism in an Authoritarian Regime - Quoc-Anh Do; Kieu-Trang Nguyen; Anh N. Tran
7. Fathers, Parental Leave and Gender Norms - Ulrike Unterhofer; Katharina Wrohlich

1. War, Inflation, and Social Capital

   Sergei Guriev (Département d'économie)

   Nikita Melnikov (Higher School of Economics (HSE))  We use weekly data from 79 Russian regions to measure the impact of economic  shocks and proximity to war in Ukraine on social capital in Russian regions.

 We proxy social capital by the relative intensity of internet searches for  the most salient dimensions of pro-social behavior such as "donate blood",  "charity", "adopt a child" etc. This measure of social capital is correlated  with a survey-based measure of generalized social trust. Our search-based  measure of social capital responds negatively to the spikes of inflation and  positively to the intensity of the conflict in Ukraine (controlling for  region and week fixed effects).

   JEL: D72 D74 E31 P24 P25 P36 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/4mupcmg7bt8iv8k3lhvbqr8p51&r=soc

2. Roots of Autocracy

   Oded Galor

   Marc Klemp

 Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across  ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically  establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as  determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of thousands  of years ago, contributed to the differential formation of pre-colonial  autocratic institutions within ethnic groups and the emergence of autocratic  institutions across countries. Diversity has amplified the importance of  institutions in mitigating the adverse effects of non-cohesiveness on  productivity, while contributing to the scope for domination, leading to the  formation of institutions of the autocratic type.

   JEL: O10 O43 Z1

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23301&r=soc

3. Institutions vs. Social Interactions in Driving Economic Convergence: Evidence from Colombia

   Coscia, Michelle (Harvard University and University of Namur)

   Cheston, Timothy (Harvard University)

   Hausmann, Ricardo (Harvard University)  Are regions poor because they have bad institutions or are they poor because  they are disconnected from the social channels through which technology  diffuses? This paper tests institutional and technological theories of  economic convergence by looking at income convergence across Colombian  municipalities. We use formal employment and wage data to estimate growth of  income per capita at the municipal level. In Colombia, municipalities are  organized into 32 departamentos or states. We use cellphone metadata to  cluster municipalities into 32 communication clusters, defined as a set of  municipalities that are densely connected through phone calls. We show that  these two forms of grouping municipalities are very different. We study the  effect on municipal income growth of the characteristics of both the state  and the communication cluster to which the municipality belongs. We find that  belonging to a richer communication cluster accelerates convergence, while  belonging to a richer state does not. This result is robust to controlling  for state fixed effects when studying the impact of communication clusters  and vice versa. The results point to the importance of social interactions  rather than formal institutions in the growth process.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp17-014&r=soc

4. Voting and Contributing While the Group is Watching

   Emeric Henry (Département d'économie)

   Charles Louis-Sidois (Département d'économie)  Members of groups and organizations often have to decide on rules that  regulate their contributions to common tasks. They typically differ in their  propensity to contribute and often care about the image they project, in  particular want to be perceived by other group members as being high  contributors. In such environments we study the interaction between the way  members vote on rules and their subsequent contribution decisions. We show  that multiple norms can emerge. We draw surprising policy implications, on  the effect of group size, of supermajority rules and of the observability of  actions.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/4g5hemr5o18g7os4h53mulpcam&r=soc

5. Cooperating Over Losses and Competing Over Gains: a Social Dilemma Experiment

   Ispano, Alessandro (THEMA - Universite de Cergy-Pontoise)

   Schwardmann, Peter (University of Munich)  Evidence from studies in international relations, the politics of reform,  collective action and price competition suggests that economic agents in  social dilemma situations cooperate more to avoid losses than in the pursuit  of gains. To test whether the prospect of losses can induce cooperation, we  let experimental subjects play the travelers dilemma in the gain and loss  domain. Subjects cooperate substantially more over losses. Furthermore, our  results suggest that this treatment effect is best explained by  reference-dependent risk preferences and reference-dependent strategic  sophistication. We discuss the implications of our results and relate our  findings to other experimental games played in the loss domain.

   Keywords: Travelers dilemma; loss domain; diminishing sensitivity; strategic sophistication;

   JEL: C90 D01 D03 D81

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rco:dpaper:23&r=soc

6. One Mandarin Benefits the Whole Clan: Hometown Favoritism in an Authoritarian Regime

   Quoc-Anh Do (Département d'économie)

   Kieu-Trang Nguyen (London School of Economics and Political Science)

   Anh N. Tran (Indiana University)

 We study patronage politics in authoritarian Vietnam, using an exhaustive  panel of ranking officials from 2000 to 2010 to estimate their promotions’

 impact on infrastructure in their hometowns of patrilineal ancestry. Native  officials’ promotions lead to a broad range of hometown infrastructure  improvement. Hometown favoritism is pervasive across all ranks, even among  officials without budget authority, except among elected legislators. Favors  are narrowly targeted towards small communes that have no political power,  and are strengthened with bad local governance and strong local family  values. The evidence suggests a likely motive of social preferences for  hometown.

   Keywords: Favoritism; Patronage; Authoritarian regime; Political connection; Hometown; Infrastructure; Distributive politics

   JEL: O12 D72 H72

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/2q4cjijvsm84gqlqqo55bjuhog&r=soc

7. Fathers, Parental Leave and Gender Norms

   Ulrike Unterhofer

   Katharina Wrohlich

 Social norms and attitudes towards gender roles have been shown to have a  large effect on economic outcomes of men and women. Many countries have  introduced policies that aim at changing gender stereotypes, for example  fathers’ quota in parental leave schemes. In this paper, we analyze whether  the introduction of the fathers’ quota in Germany in 2007, that caused a  sharp increase in the take-up of parental leave by fathers, has changed the  attitudes towards gender roles in the grandparents’ generation. To this end,  we exploit the quasi-experimental setting of the 2007 reform and compare  grandparents whose son had a child born before the 2007 reform to  grandparents whose son had a child born after it. Our results suggest that  such policy programs not only induce direct behavioral responses by the  target group but also have indirect effects on non-treated individuals  through social interaction and can thus change attitudes towards gender roles  in a society as a whole.

   Keywords: Parental leave, gender equality, social norms, social interaction, policy evaluation

   JEL: J16 J18 J22 H31 D13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1657&r=soc

This nep-soc issue comes without any express or implied warranty. You may contact the editor by reply to this mail.

General information on the NEP project can be found at http://nep.repec.org.

For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at < director @ nep point repec point org >.