We build a theory of prosocial behaviour that combines heterogeneity in individual altruism and greed with concerns for social reputation or self-respect. The presence of rewards or punishments creates doubt as to the true motive for which good deeds are performed, and this ‘overjustification...

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals’ behaviors...

From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring any Jewish father to educate his children. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this exogenous change in the religious and social norm had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history....

This paper analyzes the dynamic interaction between norms - internalized restraints on opportunistic behaviour - and institutions - restraints on such behaviour deriving from external enforcement. When individuals following a norm suffer pecuniary losses to doing so, the norm is eroded....

Traditional descent systems can roughly be divided into patrilineal and matrilineal. In the latter, a man’s heir is not his own child but rather his sister’s son. The paper examines the implications of this social norm for the pattern of inter-vivos transfers using household level data from...

A taboo is an "unthinkable" action, that is, even the thought of violating it triggers social punishment. Taboos are the social "thought police," discouraging individuals from considering certain type of actions. We consider a simple model in which taboos are part of the definition of one's...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

We analyze a model of network formation with agents that belong to different communities and an endogenous cost structure. Both individual benefits and costs depend on direct as well as indirect connections. Benefits of an indirect connection decrease with distance in the network, while the cost...

This Paper investigates whether social norms play an important role in the decision to become an entrepreneur. We study whether the individual decision to become an entrepreneur or entrepreneurial income are affected by the decisions of other individuals living in the same municipality. To...