The impact of culture on non-kin cooperation has been singled out as critical for economic activity. However, causal evidence of culture's influence on cooperation remains scant. In this paper we provide such evidence, focusing on two key components of culture: preferences and beliefs. Adopting...

We study how individuals’ willingness to delegate choice is affected by heterogeneity in identity between the delegee and the delegate. While it is straightforward that such heterogeneity can affect delegation for instrumental reasons, we show experimentally that divergent identity also causes...

We study a model of social learning in networks where the dynamics of beliefs are driven by conversations of dissonance-minimizing agents. Given their current beliefs, agents make statements, tune them to the statements of their associates, and then revise their beliefs. We characterize the...

Does social recognition motivate prosocial individuals? We run large-scale experiments among members of Italy's main blood donors association, testing social recognition both through social media and peer groups. We experimentally disentangle visibility concerns and peer comparisons, and we...

Does the Internet undermine social capital or facilitate inter-personal and civic engagement in the real world? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individuallevel data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects several dimensions of social capital. One identification...

We use anonymized and aggregated data from Facebook to show that areas with stronger social ties to two early COVID-19 “hotspots” (Westchester County, NY, in the U.S. and Lodi province in Italy) generally have more confirmed COVID-19 cases as of March 30, 2020. These relationships hold after...

Does social media or offline social cohesion overcome collective action problems more effectively when both types of networks are prevalent? We investigate non-violent protests against a place-based economic reform in Austria - a country where one in two citizens uses Facebook but also one in...

Observability has been demonstrated to influence the adoption of pro-social behavior in a variety of contexts. This study implements a field experiment to examine the influence of observability in the context of a novel pro-social behavior: peer-to-peer solar. Peer-to-peer solar offers an...

We use aggregated data from Facebook to study the structure of social networks across European regions. Social connectedness declines strongly in geographic distance and at country borders. Historical borders and unions - such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, and East/West Germany...

We use anonymized data from Facebook to construct a new measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 180 countries and 332 European regions. We find that two countries trade more with each other when they are more socially connected and when they share social connections with a similar...