In this issue we feature 13 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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1. To trust or to bid: an empirical analysis of social relationships on a fish market - Sylvain Mignot; Stéphanie Saba; Annick Vignes
2. Undoing Gender with Institutions. Lessons from the German Division and Reunification - Quentin Lippmann; Alexandre Georgieff; Claudia Senik
3. Free-Riding and Knowledge Spillovers in Teams: The Role of Social Ties - De Paola, Maria; Gioia, Francesca; Scoppa, Vincenzo
4. Social Network, Financial Market Participation and Asset Allocation: Evidence from China - Hu, Jinyan; Jiang, Mingming; Zhang, Bo
5. Influencing Connected Legislators - Battaglini, Marco; Patacchini, Eleonora
6. Who Runs? Honesty and Self-Selection into Politics - Fehrler, Sebastian; Fischbacher, Urs; Schneider, Maik T.
7. The Impact of Terrorism on Expectations, Trust and Happiness: The Case of the November 13 Attacks in Paris, France -  Tom Coupe
8. Antisocial Attitudes, Gender and Moral Judgments: An Experimental Study - Juergen Bracht; Adam Zylbersztejn
9. Miscommunication in an investment game with one-way messages - Di Bartolomeo Giovanni; Papa Stefano
10. Measuring Women's Empowerment: lessons to better understand domestic violence - Diana Lopez-Avila
11. What can we learn about the embeddedness of commercial relationships from  the study of powers of attorney?    Fabien Eloire; Claire Lemercier; Veronica Aoki Santarosa
12. Self-Control and Peer Groups: An Empirical Analysis - Battaglini, Marco; Díaz, Carlos; Patacchini, Eleonora
13. On the Origins of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Sibling Correlations -  Lindquist, Matthew; Sol, Joeri; van Praag, Mirjam; Vladasel, Theodor

 1. To trust or to bid: an empirical analysis of social relationships on a  fish market

    Sylvain Mignot (LEM - Lille - Economie et Management - Université de

     Lille, Sciences et Technologies - Fédération Universitaire et

     Polytechnique de Lille - Université de Lille, Sciences Humaines et

     Sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

    Stéphanie Saba (CRED - Centre de Recherche en Economie et Droit - UP2 -

     Université Panthéon-Assas - M.E.N.E.S.R. - Ministère de l'Éducation

     nationale, de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche)

    Annick Vignes (ENPC - Ecole des Ponts ParisTech - École des Ponts

     ParisTech (ENPC), CAMS - Centre d'analyse et de mathématique sociale -

     CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - EHESS - École des

     hautes études en sciences sociales)  This article analyses the influence of trust on the functioning of a fish  market, where agents can choose between bidding or exchanging through  bilateral transactions. Even if it is well accepted in economy that trust  plays an important role in transactions, its definition and its measurement  stay, as far as we know, very elusive. Starting from the empirical analysis  of the Boulogne-sur-Mer fish market, a market where people have the choice  between trading through auctions or bilateral exchanges, we show how the  social networks structure differ between the auction market and the bilateral  one . We then propose a measurement of trust, based on the dynamics of agents  encounters. We bring into the light that, when the transaction links on the  auction market reflects the economic constraints of the partners, the  relationships on the bilateral market depend on something more. Clearly, the  bilateral transactions result from economics and non economics determinants.

    Keywords: social networks ,trust,market design

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01298872&r=soc

 2. Undoing Gender with Institutions. Lessons from the German Division and  Reunification

    Quentin Lippmann (PSE - Paris School of Economics)

    Alexandre Georgieff (PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - CNRS -

     Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRA - Institut National de

     la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences

     sociales - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - École des Ponts

     ParisTech (ENPC), PSE - Paris School of Economics)

    Claudia Senik (PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - CNRS - Centre

     National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRA - Institut National de la

     Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences

     sociales - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - École des Ponts

     ParisTech (ENPC), PSE - Paris School of Economics, UP4 - Université

     Paris-Sorbonne)

 Social scientists have provided empirical evidence that "gender trumps  money", in the sense that gender norms can be more powerful then economic  rationality in shaping daily arrangements between spouses. In particular, it  has been shown that when they deviate from the "male breadwinner" norm, women  react by "doing gender", i.e. overplaying their feminine role by increasing  the number of housework hours that they accomplish. It has also been shown  that the risk of divorce increases when a woman earns more than her husband.

 This paper shows that, however powerful, these norms are cultural and can be  trumped by institutions. We use the 41-year division of Germany as a natural  experiment and look at differences between East and West Landers in terms of  gender behavior after the German reunification. As most countries of the  socialist bloc, the former GDR had designed institutions that were much more  gender equalizing than their counterpart in the former FRG. We show that  these institutions have created a culture that keeps influencing behavior up  to the current period. In particular, East Germany differs from West Germany  in the sense that a woman can earn more than her husband without "doing  gender" and without putting her marriage at risk.

    Keywords: Gender norms,Culture,Institutions,German Division,Household economics

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01297653&r=soc

 3. Free-Riding and Knowledge Spillovers in Teams: The Role of Social Ties

    De Paola, Maria (University of Calabria)

    Gioia, Francesca (University of Edinburgh)

    Scoppa, Vincenzo (University of Calabria)  We investigate whether and how social ties affect performance in teams by  implementing a field experiment in which a sample of undergraduate students  are randomly assigned to either teams composed by friends or teams composed  by individuals not linked by friendship relationships. Students undertake an  intermediate exam divided into two parts: one graded on the basis of  individual performance and the other graded on the basis of the team  performance. We find that students assigned to socially connected teams  perform significantly better than control students in both the team part and  the individual part of the exam, suggesting that social ties are relevant  both for solving free-riding problems and for inducing knowledge spillovers  among teammates. The positive effect of friendship persists over time: treated students obtain better grades also in a second individual test after  the conclusion of the experiment.

    Keywords: team, free-riding, knowledge spillover, social ties, randomized field experiment

    JEL: J33 J24 D82 D86 L14 C93

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10257&r=soc

 4. Social Network, Financial Market Participation and Asset Allocation: Evidence from China

    Hu, Jinyan (School of Economics, Shandong University)

    Jiang, Mingming (School of Economics, Shandong University)

    Zhang, Bo (School of Economics, Shandong University) 

According to the 2011 Chinese Household Finance Survey, about 21.8% of  Chinese households participate in the financial market; risky financial  assets account for about 8% of total household financial assets. Limited  participation and low risky asset holding appear as two features of Chinese  household finance. This paper explores the effects of social network, as an  important content of social capital, on household financial market  participation and asset allocations in both the formal and informal financial  markets. Our analysis shows that households with a broader social network  admit a higher possibility of financial market participation and a higher  fraction of risky asset holding. This finding is robust to various control  variables and to the instrumental variable estimations. In addition, two  working mechanisms are identi ed. On the one hand, social network directly  helps households to obtain necessary information, reducing the required  participation cost and raising the chance of financial market participation.

 On the other hand, social network functions as an informal institution that  facilitates household risk-sharing and affects their risk attitude, hence  indirectly changing household financial market decisions.

    Keywords: Social Network, Financial Market Participation, Asset Allocation

    JEL: D31 G11 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:xjt:rieiwp:2015-06&r=soc

 5. Influencing Connected Legislators

    Battaglini, Marco

    Patacchini, Eleonora

 This paper studies how interest groups allocate campaign contributions when  congressmen are connected by social ties. We establish conditions for the  existence of a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies for the  contribution game and characterize the associated allocation of the interest  groups' moneys. While the allocations are generally complex functions of the  environment (the voting function, the legislators' preferences and the social  network topology), they are simple, monotonically increasing functions of the  respective legislators' Bonacich centralities when the legislators are office  motivated or the number of legislators is large. Using data on the  109th-113th Congresses and on congressmen's alumni connections, we estimate  the model and find evidence supporting its predictions.

    Keywords: economics of networks; interest groups

    JEL: D72 D78

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11571&r=soc

 6. Who Runs? Honesty and Self-Selection into Politics

    Fehrler, Sebastian (University of Konstanz)

    Fischbacher, Urs (University of Konstanz)

    Schneider, Maik T. (University of Bath)  We examine the incentives to self-select into politics and how they depend on  the transparency of the entry process. To this end, we set up a two-stage  political competition model and test its key mechanisms in the lab. At the  entry stage, potential candidates compete in a contest to become their  party's nominee. At the election stage, the nominated candidates campaign by  making non-binding promises to voters. Confirming the model's key  predictions, we find in the experiment that dishonest people  over-proportionally self-select into the political race; and that this  adverse selection effect can be prevented if the entry stage is made  transparent to voters.

    Keywords: candidates, elections, campaigns, primaries, contest, voting, political economy, experiment, lying aversion, self-selection, cheap talk

    JEL: C92 D71 D83

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10258&r=soc

 7. The Impact of Terrorism on Expectations, Trust and Happiness: The Case of  the November 13 Attacks in Paris, France

    Tom Coupe (University of Canterbury)  I use quasi-experimental evidence to measure the impact of the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris, France on various channels through which terrorism can  affect the economy. The evidence suggest the attacks reduced optimism and  increased trust in the national government but did not affect current life  satisfaction nor political orientation.

    Keywords: Terrorism, Trust, Happiness, Expectations

    JEL: I31 F52 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cbt:econwp:16/21&r=soc

 8. Antisocial Attitudes, Gender and Moral Judgments: An Experimental Study

    Juergen Bracht (University of Aberdeen Business School, Department of

     Economics, Edward Wright Building, Dunbar Street, Aberdeen, AB24 3QY,

     Scotland)

    Adam Zylbersztejn (Univ Lyon, Université Lyon 2, GATE L-SE UMR 5824,

     F-69342 Lyon, France)

 We study questionnaire responses to moral dilemmas hypothetical situations in  which sacrificing one life may save many other lives. We demonstrate gender  differences in moral judgments: male participants are more supportive of the  sacrifice than female participants. We investigate the importance of the  previously studied source of the endorsement of the sacrfice: antisocial  attitudes. First, we elicit the individual proneness to spiteful behavior  using an incentivized experimental game. We demonstrate that spitefulness can  be sizable but it is not associated with gender. Second, we find that gender  is associated with moral judgments even when we account for individual  differences in antisocial attitudes. Our results suggest that the performance  of many institutions (related to the distribution of wealth or punishment,  for instance) may be affected by the gender of the decision-makers.

    Keywords: Gender, moral dilemmas, moral judgments, spite, antisocial attitudes, experiment

    JEL: C91 D03 D63

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gat:wpaper:1630&r=soc

 9. Miscommunication in an investment game with one-way messages

    Di Bartolomeo Giovanni

    Papa Stefano

 This paper aims to study the effects of free-form messages (cheap talk) in an  investment game as Berg et al. (1995). We guess that messages matter, but  they may not affect the outcomes on average because different outcomes of  communication can be systematically misunderstood generating different  effects that offset each other. Considering a non-binary choice game, where  misunderstandings are more likely to be observed, we test our intuition in  two steps. First, we classify messages by their contents and then we verify  their impact on participants’ behavior accordingly to their kind.

    Keywords: Trust, reciprocity, promises, requests, empty talk

    JEL: D03 C91 D83

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ter:wpaper:00123&r=soc

10. Measuring Women's Empowerment: lessons to better understand domestic violence

    Diana Lopez-Avila (PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - CNRS -

     Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRA - Institut National de

     la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences

     sociales - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - École des Ponts

     ParisTech (ENPC), PSE - Paris School of Economics)  This paper aims at shedding light on the relationship between women's  empowerment and domestic violence. For this, we explore different ways to  measure women's empowerment and domestic violence, and analyze whether the  relation depends on the definitions used. We take advantage of a rich data  set collected in rural Colombia, including several measures of self-esteem,  disagreement towards domestic violence, participation in household decisions  and social capital; and analyze the relationship with both aggressive and  controlling ways of domestic violence. The results indicate that the  different measures of women's empowerment help explain much better the  aggressive ways of domestic violence than the controlling ones. Our results  show a positive correlation between women's empowerment and domestic  violence. This goes in line with the theories that argue that men use  violence as a way to leverage their power within the household. Among the  different latent measures of women's empowerment we used, we found that  social capital and self-esteem are significantly correlated with aggressive  domestic violence. We do not find that more common proxies, such as women's  participation in household decisions, are significantly correlated to  domestic violence.

    Keywords: Gender,Domestic Violence,Household bargaining models,Social Capital,D13, I15, J12, J16, O12

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01294565&r=soc

11. What can we learn about the embeddedness of commercial relationships from the study of powers of attorney?

    Fabien Eloire (CLERSE - Centre lillois d'études et de recherches

     sociologiques et économiques - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche

     Scientifique - Université de Lille, Sciences et Technologies)

    Claire Lemercier (CSO - Centre de sociologie des organisations - Sciences

     Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

    Veronica Aoki Santarosa (University of Michigan [Ann Arbor])  This working paper gives the preliminary results of a research project on the  uses of notarized powers of attorney in four large French commercial cities  in the 18th and 19th centuries. Powers of attorney are often considered as  symptoms of trust. We use them to test hypotheses on the embeddedness of  commercial relationships. We find little support for the idea of an evolution  from embedded to anonymous relationships. We therefore explore alternative  hypotheses centered on the complementarity between embeddedness and  formality; the importance of repeated interactions; and a broad homophily  driving merchants to choose fellow merchants as proxies.

    Keywords: power of attorney,form of proxy,merchants,procuration,mandat, notaires

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01358364&r=soc

12. Self-Control and Peer Groups: An Empirical Analysis

    Battaglini, Marco

    Díaz, Carlos

    Patacchini, Eleonora

 We exploit the exogenous variation in peer groups generated by high school to  college transitions to study the theoretical predictions of Battaglini,  Benabou and Tirole's (2005) model of self-control in peer groups. We find  evidence consistent with the two key predictions of this theory regarding the  relationship between an agent's expected self-control problems and the size  and composition of his or her social circles: (i) students embedded in social  circles have more self-control than those who are alone and their  self-control is increasing in the size of their social group; (ii) students'

 self-control is, however, a non-monotonic hump-shaped function of the average  self-control of their friends.

    Keywords: peer effects; Self-Control

    JEL: C31 D71 D85 I21 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11563&r=soc

13. On the Origins of Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Sibling Correlations

    Lindquist, Matthew

    Sol, Joeri

    van Praag, Mirjam

    Vladasel, Theodor

 Promoting entrepreneurship has become an increasingly important part of the  policy agenda in many countries. The success of such policies, however, rests  in part on the assumption that entrepreneurship outcomes are not fully  determined at a young age by factors that are unrelated to current policy. We  test this assumption and assess the importance of family background and  neighborhood effects as determinants of entrepreneurship, by estimating  sibling correlations in entrepreneurship. We find that between 20 and 50  percent of the variance in different entrepreneurial outcomes is explained by  factors that siblings share (i.e., family background and neighborhood  effects). The average is 28 percent. Hence, entrepreneurship is far less than  fully determined at a young age. Our estimates increase only a little when  allowing for differential treatment within families by gender and birth  order. We then investigate a comprehensive set of mechanisms that explain  sibling similarities. Parental entrepreneurship plays a large role in  explaining sibling similarities, as do shared genes. We show that  neighborhood effects matter, but are rather small, particularly when compared  with the overall importance of family factors. Sibling peer effects, and  parental income and education matter even less.

    Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Family Background; Intergenerational Persistence; Neighborhood Effects; Occupational Choice; Sibling

     Correlations.

    JEL: D13 J62 L26

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11562&r=soc

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