Social norms are usually neglected in economics, because they are to a large extent enforced through nonmarket interactions and difficult to isolate empirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to work and we show that this norm has important economic effects. The...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of unemployment benefit sanctions in reducing unem-ployment duration. Swiss data on benefit sanctions allow us to separate the effect of a warning that a person is not complying with eligibility requirements from the effect of the actual enforce-ment of...