We examine the interplay between social norms and the enforcement of laws. Agents choose a behavior (e.g., tax evasion, production of low-quality products, corruption, substance abuse, etc.) and then are randomly matched with another agent. An agent's payoff decreases with the mismatch between...

Dissent plays an important role in any society, but dissenters are often silenced through social sanctions. Beyond their persuasive effects, rationales providing arguments supporting dissenters' causes can increase the public expression of dissent by providing a "social cover" for voicing...

Can informing people of high rates of community support for social distancing encourage them to do more of it? Our Mozambican study population underestimated the rate of community support for social distancing, believing support to be only 69%, while the true share was 98%. In theory, informing...

This paper presents an analysis of what types of values, especially in regards to obedience vs. independence, families impart to their children and how these values interact with social mobility. In the model, obedience is a useful characteristic for employers, especially when wages are low,...

How important are social constraints and information gaps in explaining the low rates of female labor force participation (FLFP) in conservative societies that are undergoing social change? To answer this question, we conducted a field experiment embedded in a survey of female university...

We model visibility bias in the social transmission of consumption behavior. When consumption is more salient than non-consumption, people perceive that others are consuming heavily, and infer that future prospects are favorable. This increases aggregate consumption in a positive feedback loop....

Social norms have the potential to alter the functioning of economic markets. We test whether norms shape the aggregate labor supply curve by leading decentralized individuals to maintain wage floors in their local labor markets. We partner with existing employers who create new jobs for workers...

We study how reported sexism in the population affects American women. Fixed-effects and TSLS estimates show that higher prevailing sexism where she was born (background sexism) and where she currently lives (residential sexism) both lower a woman's wages, labor force participation and ages of...

Building on standard marital matching models, we show that a variety of underlying social preferences about a given trait all generate positive assortative matching on that trait, and hence the same distribution of spousal trait differences in equilibrium. Applying this result to U.S. Census and...

The limited diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of these information frictions....