Using a new dataset, we investigate the determinants of violence against women in Africa. We focus on cultural factors arising from pre-colonial customs and find evidence consistent with two hypotheses. First, ancient socioeconomic conditions determine social norms about gender roles, family...

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....

Previous research examining attitudes toward foreigners and immigration has focused primarily on economic, socioeconomic, and cultural variables to explain the different attitudes of individuals toward foreigners. With my research, I add language as another dimension to explain these...

The paper aims to reconstruct and critically analyse efficacy as a condition of validity in Hans Kelsen's General Theory of Norms both in the light of his newly introduced distinction between the conditional and full validity of a norm and the dynamic aspect of the legal order. It also aims to...

While social scientists often theorize about the enduring effects of past regime characteristics, conceptual issues and data limitations pose real challenges for assessing these legacies empirically. This paper introduces a new measure of democratic stock, conceptualized as the accumulated...

This paper aims to contribute to the scholarly debates and efforts to understand and diagnose corruption and its societal implications. It probes the ways in which certain informal, nonlegal practices and transactions are driven not always by kleptocracy, individual greed,or survival strategies;...

Very little is known about the efficient collection of fines despite their indispensable contribution to local government budgets. This paper fills an important gap in the literature by studying the effectiveness of deterrence (enforcement) and non-deterrence (social norms) letters that aim to...

We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment with 567 children, aged four to eleven, in which we investigate the effect of social norms on lying and test whether norm sensitivity changes with age. Children think about a number between 1 and 6 in private, then roll a die, and report whether the...

This chapter examines common sense, an important domain of social knowledge. Common sense helps us effectively engage with each other and our complex world, and it often functions as social infrastructure for everyday market transactions and social interactions. Common sense does not mean...

Research examining the effect of weak punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. We examine whether this effect is due to a lack of perceived legitimacy of rule enforcement, which would enable agents to justify selfish behavior. We...