It is today generally acknowledged that social norms are important for moral hazard in social insurance systems. In this paper we study whether local variation in sickness absence can be explained by local variation in norms concerning benefit dependency – formed by social interaction on the neighborhood level. A well known methodological problem in analyses of this issue is how to disentangle ...

The paper attempts to develop a suitable accessibility index for networks where each link has a value such that a smaller number is preferred like distance, cost, or travel time. A measure called distance sum is characterized by three independent properties: anonymity, an appropriately chosen independence axiom, and dominance preservation, which requires that a node not far to any other is at l...

JEL Classification: I12, Z13 We find that veterans of the Union Army who faced greater wartime stress (as measured by higher battlefield mortality rates) experienced higher mortality rates at older ages, but that men who were from more cohesive companies were statistically significantly less likely to be affected by wartime stress. Our results hold for overall mortality, mortality from ischemic...

We consider general economies in which rational agents interact locally. The local aspect of the interactions is designed to capture in a simple abstract way social interactions, that is, socio-economic environments in which markets do not mediate all of agents’ choices, and each agent’s choice might be in part determined, for instance, by family, peer group, or ethnic group effects. We study s...

Modern logic and physical synthesis tools provide numerous options and parameters that can drastically impact design quality; however the large number of options leads to a complex design space difficult for human circuit designers to navigate. We tackle this parameter tuning problem with a novel system employing intelligent search strategies and parallel computing, thus automating one of the k...

Using data from the 2010 Colombia Demographic and Health Survey and of the National Survey of the Nutritional Situation in Colombia (ENDS-ENSIN), we analyzed the evolution of the height for the Colombian birth cohorts in the period 1946-1992 by ethnic groups defined through self-classification. We find that there are statistically significant differences in height between the ethnic groups cons...

Whitman argues that group selection is consistent with methodological individualism. He begins by defining a weak form of methodological individualism in which agents are not necessarily self-interested or rational and shows that this form of is consistent with Sober and Wilson’s model of group selection. However, Sober and Wilson’s group selection is also consistent with a methodological indiv...

Choosing the Joneses: Endogenous Goals and Reference Standards A growing economic literature stresses the importance of relative comparisons, e.g., for savings and consumption or happiness. In this literature it is usually assumed that reference standards against which people compare themselves are exogenously given. In contrast findings from social psychology suggest that people play an active...

Unemployment, Social Capital, and Subjective Well-Being It has been shown in past research that unemployment has a large negative impact on subjective well-being of individuals. In this paper, I explore whether and to what extent people with more social capital are sheltered from the harmful effects of unemployment. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984-2004, I find that social c...

 In this paper, a version of the Vector Auto Regression (VAR) model has been used to investigate the interacted and dynamic effects between social capital and economic development in Iran during the period 1987-2006. To this purpose, variables of human capital, health and income distribution have been considered as the proxies of economic development. In addition, the volume of risky bank chequ...