That institutions matter is widely accepted among economists and so are social norms as an important category of informal institutions. Social norms matter in many economic situations, but in particular for markets. The economic literature has studied the interrelation between markets and social...

What makes workers consider it fair for wages to be indexed on job performance or efficiency? In this paper we attempt to answer this question using the 2005 wave of the World Values Survey data for 43 countries to investigate what socio-economic characteristics condition employees’ preference...

Using a simple OLG model where the research output of one generation provides inputs for the next, the paper explains how quality standards can become established in scientific competition. Researchers seek status, which they get if their results are used by the next generation. Quality is...

Interdependencies in consumer behavior stem from either status-seeking consumption or compliance with social norms. This paper analyzes how a consumption act changes from a means to signal the consumer’s status to a means of norm compliance. It is shown that such a transformation can only...

This paper agrees that a suitably generalized Darwinism may help understand socioeconomic change, but finds the most publicized generalization by Hodgson and Knudsen unsuitable. To do better, it generalizes the extension of Neo-Darwinism into evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo"),...

Empirical research has shown that cultural values matter for economic growth and has specifically identified the achievement motivation as an aspect of culture that engenders economic growth. If specific cultural values engender economic growth, how then can societies promote them? This paper...

A demographic transition resulting from an increase in the size of the young working age population can be a blessing or a curse for economic performance. We focus on the political stability effects of a larger youth population and hypothesize that corruption matters in this nexus. Using panel...

An evolutionary tool kit is applied in this paper to explain how innate social behavior traits evolved in early human groups. These traits were adapted to the particular production requirements of the group in human phylogeny. They shaped the group members' attitudes towards contributing to the...

The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) is widely used to model social interaction between un- related individuals in the study of the evolution of cooperative behaviour in humans and other species. Many effective mechanisms and promotive scenarios have been studied which allow for small founding groups...

This paper studies correlates and determinants of direct democracy institutions (DDIs), such as referendums and initiatives, based on the premise that constitutions themselves are endogenous. Our sample covers as many as 132 countries from 1950 to 2006. We find that the likelihood that a country...