This paper analyzes how changes in the concentration of political power affect long-run development. We study Brazil's military dictatorship whose rise to power dramatically altered the distribution of power of local political elites. We document that municipalities that were more politically...

Inefficiencies in the bureaucratic organization of the state are often viewed as important factors in retarding economic development. Why certain societies choose or end up with such inefficient organizations has received very little attention, however. In this paper, we present a simple theory...

This paper discusses some of the attempts economists have made in the last ten years or so to integrate norms into the theory of the firm. The paper argues that (a) although norms are undoubtedly very important both inside and between firms, incorporating them into the theory has been very...

How important are social constraints and information gaps in explaining the low rates of female labor force participation (FLFP) in conservative societies that are undergoing social change? To answer this question, we conducted a field experiment embedded in a survey of female university...

We model visibility bias in the social transmission of consumption behavior. When consumption is more salient than non-consumption, people perceive that others are consuming heavily, and infer that future prospects are favorable. This increases aggregate consumption in a positive feedback loop....

Social norms have the potential to alter the functioning of economic markets. We test whether norms shape the aggregate labor supply curve by leading decentralized individuals to maintain wage floors in their local labor markets. We partner with existing employers who create new jobs for workers...

We study how reported sexism in the population affects American women. Fixed-effects and TSLS estimates show that higher prevailing sexism where she was born (background sexism) and where she currently lives (residential sexism) both lower a woman's wages, labor force participation and ages of...

Building on standard marital matching models, we show that a variety of underlying social preferences about a given trait all generate positive assortative matching on that trait, and hence the same distribution of spousal trait differences in equilibrium. Applying this result to U.S. Census and...

The limited diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of these information frictions....