Social norms permeate society across a wide range of issues and are important to understanding how societies function. In this paper we concentrate on 'bad' social norms - those that are inefficient or even damaging to a group. This paper explains how bad social norms evolve and persist; our...

This paper shows that peer pressure may lead to dynamic convergence to a norm that is skewed with respect to preferences in society, yet is endogenously upheld by the population. Moreover, a skewed norm will often be more sustainable than a representative norm. This may explain the skewness of...

Europeanization is a concept predominantly concerned with the domestic impact of the EU whilst less concerned with its historical foundations and wider geographical reach. By forwarding a Historical Sociological conceptualization of Europeanization it is revealed that the concept suffers from...

This paper reviews the literature on gender and culture. Gender gaps in various outcomes (competitiveness, labor force participation, and performance in mathematics, amongst many others) show remarkable differences across countries and tend to persist over time. The economics literature...

While social norms have received great attention within economics, little is known about the role of personal norms. We propose a simple utility framework - which assumes that people care about monetary payoff, social norms, and personal norms - and design a novel two-part experiment to...