In this issue we feature 10 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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1. One Team, One Nation: Football, Ethnic Identity, and Conflict in Africa - Depetris-Chauvín, Emilio; Durante, Ruben
2. Return on trust is lower for immigrants - Cettolin, Elena; Suetens, Sigrid
3. Promotion through Connections: Favors or Information? Yann Bramoull\'e; Kenan Huremovi\'c
4. The swing voter's curse in social networks - Buechel, Berno; Mechtenberg, Lydia
5. The experience matters: participation-related rewards increase the success chances of crowdfunding campaigns - Tobias Regner; Paolo Crosetto
6. Gender Stereotyping and Self-Stereotyping Attitudes: A Large Field Study of Managers Eriksson, Tor; Smith, Nina; Smith, Valdemar
7. P2P Lending: Information Externalities, Social Networks and Loans' Substitution - Faia, Ester; Paiella, Monica
8. Social Interaction and Labour Market Outcomes - Xin, Guangyi
9. Sharing Sequential Values in a Network - Juarez, Ruben; Ko, Chiu Yu; Xue, Jingyi
10. Do Beliefs about Peers Matter for Donation Matching? Experiments in the Field and Laboratory - Gee, Laura Katherine; Schreck, Michael J.

 1. One Team, One Nation: Football, Ethnic Identity, and Conflict in Africa

    Depetris-Chauvín, Emilio

    Durante, Ruben

 Do collective experiences that prime sentiments of national unity reduce  inter-ethnic tensions and conflict? We examine this question by looking at  the impact of national football teams' victories in sub-Saharan Africa.

 Combining individual survey data with information on official matches played  between 2000 and 2015, we find that individuals interviewed in the days after  a victory of their country's national team are less likely to report a strong  sense of ethnic identity and more likely to trust people of other ethnicities  than those interviewed just before. The effect is sizable and robust and is  not explained by generic euphoria or optimism. Crucially, national victories  do not only affect attitudes but also reduce violence. Indeed, using  plausibly exogenous variation from close qualifications to the Africa Cup of  Nations, we find that countries that (barely) qualified experience  significantly less conflict in the following six months than countries that (barely) did not. Our findings indicate that, even where ethnic tensions have  deep historical roots, patriotic shocks can reduce inter-ethnic tensions and  have a tangible impact on conflict.

    Keywords: Africa; Ethnic Conflict; Ethnic identity; Football; Nationalism; Trust

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12233&r=soc

 2. Return on trust is lower for immigrants

    Cettolin, Elena

    Suetens, Sigrid

 Trustworthiness is key for successful economic and social interactions. We  conduct an experiment with a representative sample of the Dutch population to  study whether trustworthiness depends on the ethnicity of the interaction  partner. Native Dutch trustees play trust games with an anonymous other, who  is either another native Dutch or an immigrant from non-Western descent. We  find that the trustees reciprocate trust up to 13% less frequently if the  trustor is a non-Western immigrant than if he/she is native Dutch. This  percentage increases up to 23% for trustees who report disliking ethnic  diversity in society in a survey that took place one year before the  experiment. Since the decision to reciprocate does not involve behavioral  risk, we take our results as evidence of taste-based discrimination. The  implication is that the return on trust is lower for immigrants from  non-Western descent than for native Dutch.

    Keywords: ethnic diversity; representative sample; taste-based discrimination; trust game; trustworthiness

    JEL: C72 C9 D01 J15

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12244&r=soc

 3. Promotion through Connections: Favors or Information?

    Yann Bramoull\'e

    Kenan Huremovi\'c

 Connections appear to be helpful in many contexts such as obtaining a job, a  promotion, a grant, a loan or publishing a paper. This may be due to  favoritism or to information conveyed by connections. Attempts at identifying  both effects have relied on measures of true quality, generally built from  data collected long after promotion. This empirical strategy faces important  limitations. Building on earlier work on discrimination, we propose a new  method to identify favors and information from classical data collected at  time of promotion. Under natural assumptions, we show that promotion  decisions look more random for connected candidates, due to the information  channel. We obtain new identification results and show how probit models with  heteroscedasticity can be used to estimate the strength of the two effects.

 We apply our method to the data on academic promotions in Spain studied in  Zinovyeva & Bagues (2015). We find evidence of both favors and information  effects at work. Empirical results are consistent with evidence obtained from  quality measures collected five years after promotion.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1708.07723&r=soc

 4. The swing voter's curse in social networks

    Buechel, Berno

    Mechtenberg, Lydia

 We study private communication in social networks prior to a majority vote on  two alternative policies. Some (or all) agents receive a private imperfect  signal about which policy is correct. They can, but need not, recommend a  policy to their neighbors in the social network prior to the vote. We show  theoretically and empirically that communication can undermine efficiency of  the vote and hence reduce welfare in a common interest setting. Both  efficiency and existence of fully informative equilibria in which vote  recommendations are always truthfully given and followed hinge on the  structure of the communication network. If some voters have distinctly larger  audiences than others, their neighbors should not follow their vote  recommendation; however, they may do so in equilibrium. We test the model in  a lab experiment and find strong support for the comparative-statics and,  more generally, for the importance of the network structure for voting  behavior.

    Keywords: Strategic Voting; Social Networks; Swing Voter’s Curse; Information Aggregation

    JEL: D72 D83 D85 C91

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fri:fribow:fribow00485&r=soc

 5. The experience matters: participation-related rewards increase the success chances of crowdfunding campaigns

    Tobias Regner (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena)

    Paolo Crosetto (GAEL - Laboratoire d'Economie Appliquée de Grenoble -

     Grenoble INP - Institut polytechnique de Grenoble - Grenoble Institute of

     Technology - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - CNRS -

     Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes)

 Crowdfunding recently emerged as an alternative funding channel for  start-ups, creative artists and social endeavors. On specialized web  platforms, project creators ask the crowd for support and provide in return a  set of rewards, modulated according to the amount of support pledged. Our  study investigates the role of self- and social-image enhancing rewards in  determining project success. Using data from 346 projects hosted by  Startnext, the biggest crowdfunding platform in Germany, we show that  providing higher shares of reward levels that let pledgers participate in and  experience the project is correlated with project success.

    Keywords: social-image,self-image,reward levels,identity,crowdfunding,entrepreneurial finance,donations

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01527150&r=soc

 6. Gender Stereotyping and Self-Stereotyping Attitudes: A Large Field Study of Managers

    Eriksson, Tor (Aarhus School of Business)

    Smith, Nina (Aarhus University)

    Smith, Valdemar (Aarhus School of Business)  The dearth of women in top managerial positions is characterized by a high  persistence and insensitivity to changes and differences in institutions and  policies. This suggests it could be caused by slowly changing social norms  and attitudes in the labor market, such as gender stereotypes and gender  identity. This paper examines gender stereotypes and self-stereotyping in a  large cross section of (about 2,970) managers at different job levels in

 (1,875) Danish private-sector firms. The survey data used contain detailed  information about the managers as well as their employers. We find  significant gender differences between managers with regard to gender  stereotyping attitudes. Male managers on average tend to have stronger gender  stereotype views with respect to the role as a successful manager than their  female peers. However, female CEOs' gender stereotypes do not differ from  their male peers' and have significantly more pronounced masculine  stereotypes than female managers at lower levels. Female managers have  stronger beliefs in their own managerial abilities regarding feminine skills  and weaker beliefs in their masculine skills, whereas the opposite is  observed for male managers. Gender stereotypes and self-stereotypes vary  across types of managerial employees and firms. Beliefs in own ability could  explain at most ten percent of the observed gender differential in C-level  executive positions.

    Keywords: glass ceiling effects, gender, self-stereotypes, stereotypes, managerial labor markets

    JEL: J16 D83 D84 M51

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10932&r=soc

 7. P2P Lending: Information Externalities, Social Networks and Loans' Substitution

    Faia, Ester

    Paiella, Monica

 Despite the lack of delegated monitor and of collateral guarantees P2P  lending platforms exhibit relatively low loan and delinquency rates. The  adverse selection is indeed mitigated by a new screening technology  (information processing through machine learning) that provides costless  public signals. Using data from Prosper and Lending Club we show that loans' spreads, proxing asymmetric information, decline with credit scores or hard  information indicators and with indications from "group ties" (soft  information from social networks). Also an increase in the risk of bank run  in the traditional banking sector increases participation in the P2P markets  and reduces their rates (substitution effect). We rationalize this evidence  with a dynamic general equilibrium model where lenders and borrowers choose  between traditional bank services (subject to the risk of bank runs and early

 liquidation) and P2P markets (which clear at a pooling price due to  asymmetric information, but where public signals facilitate screening).

    Keywords: liquidity shocks; peer-to-peer lending; pooling equilibria; signals; value of information

    JEL: G11 G23

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12235&r=soc

 8. Social Interaction and Labour Market Outcomes

    Xin, Guangyi

 This paper studies the effect of social interaction on employment status and  employment quality by using longitudinal data from BHPS (British Household  Panel Survey). Active community membership is employed as the measurement of  social Interaction. Various identification strategies provide robust evidence  that a higher level of social interaction results in increased probability of  being full-time employed. The effect of social interaction on employment  status is also investigated among different gender groups and at different  age stages. Moreover, three indices of social interaction have been  constructed to capture the different dimension effect of social interaction  on labour market outcome. As a result, active group memberships in  professional organisations and sport clubs have the largest effect. Regarding  employment quality, social interaction leads to a positive and significant  effect on wages. This social interaction effect is also studied among  different gender and occupation groups.

    Keywords: Social Capital; Social Interaction; Labour Market Outcome

    JEL: C1 J21 J31 J64 L14

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:80976&r=soc

 9. Sharing Sequential Values in a Network

    Juarez, Ruben (Department of Economics, University of Hawaii)

    Ko, Chiu Yu (Department of Economics, National University of Singapore)

    Xue, Jingyi (School of Economics, Singapore Management University)  Consider a sequential process where agents have individual values at every  possible step. A planner is in charge of selecting steps and distributing the  accumulated aggregate values among agents. We model this process by a  directed network where each edge is associated with a vector of individual  values. This model applies to several new and existing problems, e.g.,  developing a connected public facility and distributing total values received  by surrounding districts; selecting a long-term production plan and sharing  final profits among partners of a firm; choosing a machine schedule to serve  different tasks and distributing total outputs among task owners. Herein, we  provide the first axiomatic study on path selection and value sharing in  networks. We consider four sets of axioms from different perspectives,  including those related to (1) the sequential consistency of assignments with  respect to network decompositions; (2) the monotonicity of assignments with  respect to network expansion; (3) the independence of assignments with  respect to certain network transformations; and (4) implementation in the  case where the planner has no information about the underlying network and  individual values. Surprisingly, these four disparate sets of axioms  characterize similar classes of solutions — selecting efficient path(s) and  assigning to each agent a share of total values which is independent of their  individual values. Furthermore, we characterize more general solutions that  depend on individual values.

    Keywords: Sequential Values; Sharing; Network; Redistribution

    JEL: C72 D44 D71 D82

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:smuesw:2017_003&r=soc

10. Do Beliefs about Peers Matter for Donation Matching? Experiments in the Field and Laboratory

    Gee, Laura Katherine (Tufts University)

    Schreck, Michael J. (Analysis Group)  A popular fundraising tool is donation matching, where every dollar is  matched by a third party. But field experiments find that matching does not  always increase donations. This may occur because individuals believe that  peer donors will exhaust the matching funds, so their donation is not pivotal  to obtaining matching funds. We develop a theory of how beliefs about peers' donations affect one's own likelihood of donation. We test our theory using  novel "threshold match" treatments in field and laboratory experiments. These  treatments form small groups and offer a flat matching bonus if a threshold  number of donations is received. One "threshold match" treatment more than  doubles the donation rate in the field relative to no match. To better  understand the mechanism behind this huge increase, we use a lab study to  replicate the field results and further show that beliefs about peers' donations matter. Our theoretical, lab, and field results combined suggest  people are more likely to donate when they believe they are more pivotal to  securing matching money. Beliefs about others matter, and they should be  taken into account when trying to increase donations.

    Keywords: charitable giving, field experiment, beliefs, public goods

    JEL: C93 D64 H41

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10956&r=soc

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