This paper provides experimental evidence showing that indirectreciprocity may important in economic decision making and in thedevelopment of group norms. We study a `repeated helping game' withrandom pairing in large groups, with individuals equally dividedbetween donors and recipients. Donors...

In an influential study, Mas and Moretti (2009) find that "worker effort is positively related to the productivity of workers who see him, but not workers who do not see him". They interpret this as evidence that social pressure can reduce free riding. In this paper we report an attempt to...

Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to post-secondary education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of girls in...

Previous studies have shown that an oath can reduce lying at an individual level. Can oaths reduce lying in groups, a context where the prevalence of lying is typically higher? Results from a lab experiment reveal that the impact of an oath on lying in a group context depends on the incentive...

In this paper we test the celebrated `Strength of weak ties' theory of Granovetter (1973). We test two hypotheses on the network structure in a data set of collaborating economists. While we find support for the hypothesis of transitivity of strong ties, we reject the hypothesis that weak ties...

A fundamental question in social sciences is how trust emerges. We provide an answer which relies on the formation of social and economic relationships. We argue that behind trust lies the fact that individuals invest in connections taking into account the potential externalities networks...