We analyze social and economic phenomena involving beliefs which people value and invest in, for affective or functional reasons. Individuals are at times uncertain about their own quot;deep valuesquot; and infer them from their past choices, which then come to define quot;who they are.quot;...

Social norms can mitigate the effectiveness of formal institutions, in particular the way legal reforms may affect women's autonomy. We examine this question in the context of ethnic variation in traditional post-marital cohabitation, i.e. matrilocality versus patrilocality. We use...

We assess the role of gender-conforming social norms in household decision-making and gender inequalities in the labor market with a parsimonious household model that endogenizes commuting time. Using the American Community Survey 2008-2019, we test the model predictions and find that women in...

With only 32% of active age women in the labor market, Guatemala is an upper middle-income country with one of the lowest rates of female labor force participation in the Latin America and the Caribbean region, and in the world. The rate of female labor participation is especially low in the...

Peer observation can influence social norm perceptions as well as behavior in various moral domains, but is the tendency to be influenced by and conform with peers domain-general? In an online experiment (N = 815), we studied peer effects in honesty and cooperation and tested the...

Child labor is a widespread phenomenon and therefore is of interest to both researchers and policy makers. Various reasons for the existence of child labor have been proposed with the goal of designing appropriate solutions. While household poverty is viewed as the main reason for child labor,...

Using individual-level data from the European Social Survey, we study the relevance of gender norms in accounting for the motherhood employment gap across 186 European NUTS2 regions (over 29 countries) for the 2002-2016 period. The gender norm variable is taken from a question on whether "men...

Our model explains the observed gender-specific patterns of career and child care choices through endogenous social norms. We study how these norms interact with the gender wage gap. We show that via the social norm a couple's child care and career choices impose an externality on other couples,...

Daughters are the principal caregivers of their dependent parents. In this paper, we study long-term care (LTC) choices by bargaining families with mixed- or same-gender siblings. LTC care can be provided either informally by children, or formally at home or in an institution. A social norm...

Over the last decade, the economic literature has increasingly focused on the importance of gender identity and sticky gender norms in an attempt to explain the persistence of the gender gaps. Using detailed register data on the latest cohorts of Danish labour market entrants, this paper...