Several economists have maintained that social sanctions can enforce cooperation in public good situations. This experimental study investigates whether indirect social sanctions from monetarily unaffected observers can increase contributions to a public good. The experiment has two treatment...

Public funding of water supply infrastructure in developing countries is often justified by the expectation that the time spent on water collection significantly decreases, leading to increased labor force participation of women. In this study we empirically test this hypothesis by applying a...

An essential difference between the design of the Swedish and the US in-work tax credit systems relates to their functional forms. Where the US earned income tax credit (EITC) is phased out and favours low and medium earnings, the Swedish system is not phased out and offers 17 and 7 per cent tax...

I study the effects of the level of disability benefits on disability uptake. Estimation of such effects is difficult because individual levels of disability pension benefits are closely related to individual characteristics that may also affect disability uptake through other mechanisms. I...

Universal parental leaves with job protection and earnings compensation increase women's attachment to the labour market, but very long leaves may have negative consequences both at the individual and the societal level. Some scholars have therefore argued that generous family-friendly policies...

This article studies how a firm fosters formal and informal interaction among its employees to create a collective identity and positively influence their effort. We develop an agency model, in which employees have both a personal and a social ideal for effort. The firm does not observe the...

The formation of peer groups with social norms for private contributions to a public good is analyzed in an n-player two stage game. First people choose a peer group, then they choose whether to contribute. The first choice is made through a learning process represented by evolutionary dynamics,...

This paper studies the formation of social norms for considerate smoking behavior. Being considerate gives smokers a higher social approval from non-smokers, but imposes an inconvenience cost. A non-smoker's disapproval of inconsiderate smoking is assumed to be stronger the less used he is to...

It is sometimes claimed that individuals' contributions to public goods are not motivated by economic costs and benefits alone, but that people also have a moral or norm-based motivation. A number of studies indicate that such moral or norm-based motivation might be crowded out, or crowded in,...

A prevailing view in the literature is that social sanctions can support, in equilibrium, high levels of obedience to a costly norm. The reason is that social disapproval and stigmatization faced by the disobedient are highest when disobedience is the exception rather than the rule in society....