There is a lot of evidence that identity matters for behaviour. There is a widespread belief that societies will function better if they manage to establish a common sense of identity among the population and contemporary fears in many countries that this common identity is threatened. This...

This paper seeks to understand the role that peer comparisons play in the determination of executive compensation. I exploit a recent change in the Securities and Exchange Commission's regulations that requires firms to disclose the peer companies used for determining the compensation of their...

This paper uses a pseudo-panel approach at an age-based cohort level to investigate the extent to which social capital accounts for differences in entrepreneurial activities. The findings suggest that trust measured by trust either in strangers or in public institutions facilitates...

Levels of trust are measured by asking standard survey questions on trust and by observing behavior in a trust game using a random sample in rural Bangladesh. Follow-up questions and correlations between stated expectations and the amount sent in the trust game reveal that the amount sent is...

We analyze the impact of institutional and cultural factors on the supply side of open source software (OSS). OSS is a privately provided public good: it is marked by free access to the software and its source code, and is developed in a public, collaborative manner by thousands of volunteers as...

Trust is critical during times of institutional crisis, but intuition is ambiguous with regards to economic calamity: would a scarcer supply of goods cause greater animosity, or does a worsening economic climate constitute a common foe against which people can unite? This study investigates the...

We develop a dynamic model to analyze the sources and the evolution of social participation and social capital in a growing economy characterized by exogenous technical progress. We start from the assumption that the well-being of agents basically depends on material and relational goods....

Social interaction among individuals with a preference for conformity gives rise to coordination externalities which are not internalized in a non-cooperative setting. Mandating behavioral conformity, by centrally imposing a common, group-wide action, internalizes these coordination...

We look at the effect of importance of religion in daily life on social trust, defined as the share of a population that thinks that people in general can be trusted. We make use of new data from the Gallup World Poll for 109 countries and 43 U.S. states. Our empirical results indicate a robust,...

This paper describes an evolutionary perspective on human development and wellbeing and contrasts it with the model of self-interest that is prominent in economics. The two approaches have considerably different implications for how human wellbeing might be improved. Research in psychology,...