Showing 1 - 10 of 69
reduces a colleague's marginal cost of effort, and synergy to be the sum of the (unidimensional) influence parameters across a … depends only on total synergy and not individual influence parameters. An increase in synergy raises total effort and total … synergistic agents. An increase in the synergy between two agents can lead to the third agent being excluded from the team, even …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013118246
What happens when immigrant girls are given increased opportunities to integrate into the workplace and society, but their parents value more traditional cultural outcomes? Building on Akerlof and Kranton’s identity framework (2000), we construct a simple game-theoretic model which shows how...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014102235
The presence of a westward-moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the Frontier Thesis and identify its long-run implications for culture and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013218964
We investigate the determinants of the fertility decline in Europe from 1830 to 1970 using a newly constructed dataset of linguistic distances between European regions. We find that the fertility decline resulted from a gradual diffusion of new fertility behavior from French-speaking regions to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013224966
Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013228755
Using micro data on more than 130,000 individuals from 69 countries, we analyze the extent to which joblessness of the individuals and the prevailing unemployment rate in the country impact perceptions of the effectiveness of democracy. We find that personal joblessness experience translates...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013143456
Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013118835
This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013145406
This paper assesses the role of ideas in economic change, combining economic and historical analysis with insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology. Belief systems shape the system of categories ("pre-confirmatory bias") and perceptions (confirmatory bias), and are themselves...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013147216
Flexible labor markets require geographically mobile workers to be efficient. Otherwise firms can take advantage of the immobility of workers and extract rents at the expense of workers. In cultures with strong family ties, moving away from home is costly. Thus, to limit the rents of firms and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013147612