Empirical studies have shown that preferences for redistribution are significantly correlated with expectations of future mobility and the belief that society offers equal opportunities. We add to previous research by investigating the role of individual and social norms on rent seeking. We find...

The expansion of welfare-state arrangements is seen as the result of dynamic interaction between market behaviour and political behaviour, often with considerable time lags, sometimes generating either virtuous or vicious circles. Such interaction may also involve induced (endogenous) changes in...

The paper analyses the interaction between economic incentives and work norms in the context of social insurance. If the work norm is endogenous in the sense that it is weaker when the population share of beneficiaries is higher, then voters will choose less generous bene.ts than otherwise. We...

Over the last couple of decades, it has become a commonplace to claim that institutions matter for economic development. Yet, institutions are not exogenous but the result of human action. It is argued here that the values and norms held by substantial parts of society's members are an important...

We document individual willingness to fight climate change and its behavioral determinants in a large representative sample of US adults. Willingness to fight climate change – as measured through an incentivized donation decision – is highly heterogeneous across the population. Individual...

Modern economics includes two fundamentally different fields, each labelled ‘Cultural Economics’. The first type ‘Cultural Institutions’ deals with a specific sector of the economy and society, namely institutions in the performing arts, visual arts, and other forms of cultural industry....

The idea that people follow trust norms when making trust decisions is developed in an evolutionary model of adaptive play by boundedly rational agents. Because it neither implies nor is it implied by cooperation, trust is not modelled as cooperation in a Prisoners' Dilemma but as a coordination...

This paper introduces a generalized representation of the formation of continuous preferences (which can reflect different intensities). The preference intensity that a child adopts is formed as the collective outcome of all role models for preference intensities - which are derived from the...

Mounting empirical evidence shows that kids of self-employed parents are very likely to become entrepreneurs themselves. These findings are often attributed to the intergenerational transmission of parental norms and values. However, many papers in the field are not that explicit about parental...