To help explain differences between the US and EU "social contracts" as well as other cultural differences, we present a model of rational voting over redistribution where individual attitudes toward others are endogenously determined. Individuals differ in their productivities and their degree...

Moral values influence individual behavior and social interactions. A specially significant instance is the case of moral values concerning work effort. Individuals determine what they take to be proper behaviour and judge the others, and themselves, accordingly. They increase their esteem -and...

We examine the interactions between individual behavior, sentiments and the social contract in a model of rational voting over redistribution. Agents have moral work values. Individuals self-esteem and social consideration of others are endogenously determined comparing behaviors to moral...

We present a tractable stochastic endogenous growth model that explains how social capital influences economic development. In our model, social capital increases citizens' awareness of government activity. Hence, it alleviates the electoral incentives to under- invest in education, whose...

We suggest that cultivating an individual‟s connectedness to others promotes socially responsible behavior both directly and indirectly through increased perceived ability to make a difference. Individuals whose interdependent self is more prominent feel they have more of an impact on larger...

There are many situations in which individuals have a choice of whether or not to observe eventual outcomes. In these instances, individuals often prefer to remain ignorant. These contexts are outside the scope of analysis of the standard von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) expected utility model,...

Understanding if altruism motivates intergenerational monetary transfers is crucial to assess the effectiveness of public policies that redistribute income across generations. Previous works have rejected the altruism hypothesis. This paper presents an altruism model that incorporates effort of...

This paper investigates experimentally how organisational decision processes affect the moral motivations of actors inside a firm that must forego profits to reduce harming a third party. In a "vertical" treatment, one insider unilaterally sets the harm-reduction strategy; the other can only...

This paper shows that models where preferences of individuals depend not only on their allocations, but also on the well-being of other persons, can produce both large and testable effects. We study the allocation of workers with heterogeneous productivities to firms. We show that even small...

We use experimental data to obtain a detailed description of individuals' pro-sociality. Participants are faced with a large number of decisions involving variations in the tradeoffs between own and others' payoffs, as well as in other potentially important factors like individuals' positions...