It is now abundantly clear that social norms channel behaviour and impact economic development. This insight leads to the question: How do social norms evolve? In a companion paper (Voigt (2023). Journal of Institutional Economics, 20), I survey studies showing that geographical conditions can have direct and long-lasting effects on social norms. This paper goes one step further: It surveys studies that show how different geographical conditions affect both religious beliefs as well as traditions of family organization and how these, in turn, affect social norms.

It is now abundantly clear that social norms channel behaviour and impact economic development. This insight leads to the question: How do social norms evolve? This survey examines research that relies on geography to explain the development of social norms. It turns out that many social norms are either directly or indirectly determined by geography broadly conceived and can, hence, be considered largely time invariant. Given that successful economic development presupposes the congruence between formal institutions and social norms, this insight is highly relevant for all policy interventions designed to foster economic development. In a companion paper, the role of religion and family organization as potential mediators between geography and social norms assumes centre stage.

International migration represents a potential channel for the transmission of norms, attitudes, and values back to the home countries. In this paper, we explore how international migration affects tax morale and aversion to the free-riding of members of the household left behind in the home country. We use a rich longitudinal household-level database on Polish society (period 2007–2015) that allows us to observe social attitudes and values of individuals before and after the actual migration of a member of the household. We find that having a migrant in the household has a significant and positive effect on tax morale and increases aversion toward free-riding of stayers. We also find that migrants have a lower level of tax morale before departure compared to stayers, suggesting that international migration leads to an overall gain in pro-social behaviors.

It is often argued that governments take advantage of extreme events to expand their power to the detriment of the political opposition and citizens at large. Violations of constitutional constraints are a clear indication of such opportunistic behaviour. We study whether natural disasters, conflicts and other extreme events systematically diminish governments' compliance with constitutional constraints. Our results indicate that governments are most likely to overstep their competences or disregard their responsibilities during civil conflicts, at the onset of international sanctions or following successful coups d’état. Interestingly, Cold War interventions by the United States that installed or supported a political leader led to a decrease in constitutional compliance in the target country, whereas Soviet interventions had no such effect. In contrast, banking crises and natural disasters, which threaten societies at large, but not necessarily the political elite, do not cause a significant decline in constitutional compliance.

Is it possible to exploit cognitive biases so that a non-professional taster prefers one wine to several other absolutely identical wines? To address this question, three complementary experiments were carried out. Each time, five wines were tasted blind in a tasting laboratory by 24 to 34 tasters. Converging evidence from the experiments shows that participants were not capable of identifying that some of the wines they were tasting were absolutely identical. Moreover, the results show that by providing information about the wines’ ratings, prices, or reputation, tasters’ expectations can be modified, and, as a result, their evaluations of the wines can be altered. Specifically, we show that it is possible to modify the ranking between different wines and to get tasters to prefer a wine over other absolutely identical wines. Finally, a surprising finding was that experienced tasters express stronger opinions and adapt their evaluations more strongly after being given manipulative information on the wines they taste.

This article investigates the practices of precarious playbour on Kuaishou, a short-video platform embracing the idea of ‘recording the lives of ordinary people’ and attracting massive numbers of migrant youth to produce creative content as free labour. It examines how young migrants from rural areas in China engage in Kuaishou as a means of realising upwards socio-economic mobility by producing a tuwei (earthiness) culture which has a large fan base. It also examines the way in which they collaborate to cope with precarious conditions lacking guaranteed working time and income, and labour protection. The article attempts to build a conversation with existing scholarship that addresses the ‘exploitation vs. empowerment’ dialectic of labour production. Instead, we address the complexity of digital labour production characterised by a collaborative and symbiotic relationship between social media platforms and users. Through ‘play’ with their followers that generates profit for the digital platform, migrant youth voluntarily accept the uncertain, unpredictable, and risky conditions of digital labour production. They are, however, not passively subjected to platform exploitation but can instead reclaim agency by actively seeking to collaborate with other users to cope with increasing precariousness.

The paper examines doctrinal and political reasons to explain why the Ancient Greek religion did not feature a distinct class of professional priests as suppliers of religious goods. Doctrinal reasons relate to worshiping a multitude of powerful anthropomorphic gods with flawed characters; absence of a founder of religion and of a scripture; lack of religious doctrine and of a code of moral behaviour and piety manifested as mass participation in rituals. These factors denied religious suppliers the opportunity to form a monopoly acting as an autonomous intermediary between humans and gods. Political reasons relate to the supremacy of the demos which watchfully guarded its decision-making powers and prevented other actors like a priestly interest group to challenge its authority.

We examine the cultural context for individual's trust in public institutions. To shed some light on possible cultural explanations from a more comparative perspective and cover a wider set of cultural aspects, we use indicators of cultural dimensions by Kaasa et al. (2014) based on Hofstede's (1980) approach. Multilevel regression analysis is conducted with individual-level data from two waves of the European Social Survey (2008, 2010) and regional-level data from multiple sources. Confirmatory factor analysis is used to construct the indicators of social and institutional trust and corruption. Our results suggest that individuals tend to trust institutions less in regions with large power distance. Hence, an important key for governments being more successful in achieving their aims seems to be related to improving the sense of participation and civic responsibility.

We study the link between residential segregation and fertility for the socially excluded and marginalized Roma ethnic minority. Using original survey data we collected in Serbia, we investigate whether fertility differs between ethnically homogeneous and mixed neighborhoods. Our results show that Roma in less-segregated areas tend to have significantly fewer children (around 0.8). Most of the difference arises from Roma in less-segregated areas waiting substantially more after having a boy than their counterparts in more-segregated areas. We exploit variation in the share of Serbian sounding first names to provide evidence that a mechanism at play is a shift in preferences toward lower fertility and sons rather than daughters induced by a higher exposure to the Serbian majority culture.

The history of England's institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date, there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England's institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution, we generate and analyze the first quantitative estimates of the development of English caselaw and its associated legal ideas. We achieve this in two companion papers. In this, the first of the pair, we build a comprehensive corpus of 52,949 reports of cases heard in England's high courts before 1765. Estimating a 100-topic structural topic model, we name and interpret all topics, each of which reflects a distinctive aspect of English legal thought. We produce time series of the estimated topic prevalences. To interpret the topic timelines, we develop a tractable model of the evolution of legal-cultural ideas and their prominence in case reports. In the companion paper, we will illustrate with multiple applications the usefulness of the large amount of new information generated by our approach.

Parental beliefs are recognised by psychologists as an important causal influence on child development. A two-period model of human capital accumulation in the framework of Becker and Tomes (1986) is presented. In the first period parents transfer their beliefs, distinct from genes, to children by signalling their ‘belief in a just world’ or their perceived return to effort. Children respond by choosing effort, irrespective of the real world returns, which combines with their genes to create early ability. This determines the rate of return to second-period investment and final attainment. If parents are credit constrained, both beliefs and income determine attainment. Empirical analysis using the second generation of the NCDS shows that beliefs are a strong predictor of early attainment and significantly reduce the importance of parental income. The identifying assumption is that parent beliefs are slow-moving and not conditioned on the child.

In 1997, the Christie’s sale of 20th century art works from the estate Victor and Sally Ganz netted more than $207 million, a record sum for a single-owner sale of art at auction. The paper presents estimates of the Ganzes’ financial returns from investing in art using records the Ganzes’ kept on the prices they originally paid for the works sold in 1997 and two earlier auctions in 1986 and 1988. Over the period 1948 to 1997 the Ganzes earned real rates of return ranging from 12 to over 21 percent for works sold at the three auctions. Overall, the Ganzes beat-often by a wide margin-the returns from diversified portfolios of common stocks. The empirical evidence shows that the Ganzes were not only lucky but skillful investors as well. Their financial success did not result from a few lucky purchases. They earned consistently high returns, regularly beating the stock market on works by different artists acquired at different time periods. I also found that buyers were willing to pay a price premium for works from the Ganz collection compared to “identical” works sold by others. For example, buyers paid between 25 and 90 percent more for prints from the Ganz collection than for otherwise identical prints. The likely source of this premium is the quality and prestige of the Ganzes’ collection itself not the recently acquired celebrity status of the collectors.

This paper provides a brief overview of policy intervention mechanisms affecting the preservation of the historic environment in Britain. This covers half a million “listed buildings” in England alone. Within this policy framework, the paper then discusses stated preference valuation exercises on the built environment and the results of a long – term exercise comparing returns of listed and unlisted office properties in the UK since 1980.