We test if social work norms are important for work absence due to self-perceived sickness. To this end, we use a randomized social experiment designed to estimate the effect of monitoring on work absence. The treated were exposed to less monitoring of their eligibility to use sickness...

Across countries, generous social insurance comes along with weak work norms. This finding is often taken to mean that in the long run social insurance generates large output losses. But neither individual nor country data corroborates the view that weak work norms worsen economic performance....

Natural disasters trigger large inequalities between affected households and the rest of the community. The extent to which villages compensate for these shocks allegedly depends on the pressure imposed by the group of needy families. I model two major threats to redistribution - (i) the...

This paper challanges the view that weak work norms in generous welfare states makes them economically unsustainable. I develop a dynamic model of family-transmitted values that has a laissez-faire equilibrium with strong work norms coexisting with a social-insurance equilibrium with weak work...

Based on administrative panel data from Norway, we examine how social insurance dependency spreads within neighborhoods, families, ethnic minorities, and among former schoolmates. We use a fixed effects methodology that accounts for endogenous group formation, contextual interactions, and...

The paper analyses how cooperation in a repeated social game may help to sustain cooperation in a "linked" repeated production game. We show that this may happen a)because of available "social capital", defined as the slack of punishment power present in the social repeated game, b) because,...