We conduct a laboratory experiment in which we expose participants to situational social norms of approval or disapproval of lying. While participants on average conform to the situational pressure, the results highlight important differences in individual reactions. Situational norms crowd out...

This paper presents an industry equilibrium model where firms can choose to engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. We model CSR activities as an investment in customer loyalty and show that CSR decreases systematic risk and increases firm value. These effects are stronger...

Over the last decade the locus of policy-making towards asylum seekers and refugees has shifted away from national governments and towards the EU as the Common European Asylum Policy has developed. Most of the focus has been on the harmonisation of policies relating to border control, the...

We investigate possible racial discrimination in the context of discretionary parole release. We develop a rational choice model of release whereby a parole board must balance parolees' risk of violation with the cost of not releasing prisoners who may not violate their parole. A color-blind...

We investigate the long term determinants of political and economic outcomes over a new data set composed of Mississippi counties. We analyze the effect of disfranchisement on voting registration at the end of the nineteenth century (1896-9), as well as the impact of voting registration on...

The aim of this paper is to provide a new mechanism based on social interactions explaining why minority workers have worse labor-market outcomes than majority workers. Building on Granovetter's idea that weak ties are superior to strong ties for providing support in getting a job, we develop a...

In this paper, we analyze how the share of immigrant children in the classroom affects the educational attainment of native Dutch children. Our analysis uses data from various sources, which allow us to characterize educational attainment in terms of reading literacy, mathematical skills and...

We study the evolution of racial educational inequality across US states from 1940 to 2000. We show that throughout this period, despite evidence of convergence, the racial gap in attainment between blacks and whites has been persistently determined by the initial gap. We obtain these results...

We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why this behavior may persist over time. We first show that the prevalence of an oppositional...

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...