Assessing the effects of pandemic risk on cooperation and social norms using a before-after Covid-19 comparison in two long-term experiments.

How does threat from disease shape our cooperative actions and the social norms that guide such behaviour? To study these questions, we draw on a collective-risk social dilemma experiment that we ran before the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic (Wave 1, 2018) and compare this to its exact replication, sampling from the same population, that we conducted during the first wave of the pandemic (Wave 2, 2020). Tightness-looseness theory predicts and evidence generally supports that both cooperation and accompanying social norms should increase, yet, we mostly did not find this. Contributions, the probability of reaching the threshold (cooperation), and the contents of the social norm (how much people should contribute) remained similar across the waves, although the strength of these social norms were slightly greater in Wave 2. We also study whether the results from Wave 1 that should not be affected by the pandemic-the relationship between social norms and cooperation and specific behavioural types-replicate in Wave 2 and find that these results generally hold. Overall, our work demonstrates that social norms are important drivers of cooperation, yet, communicable diseases, at least in the short term, have little or no effects on either.

Social capital as a network measure provides new insights on economic growth.

Unveiling the main drivers of economic growth is of paramount importance. Previous research recognizes the critical role played by the factors of production: capital and labor. However, the exact mechanisms that underpin Total Factor Productivity (TFP) are not fully understood. An increasing number of studies suggests that the creation and transmission of knowledge, factor supply and economic integration are indeed crucial. Yet, the need for a systematic and unifying framework still exists. Nowadays capital and labor are embedded into a complex network structure through global supply chains and international migration. Recent research has established a link between network centralities and different types of social capital. In this work we employ the OECD's Multi-Regional Input-Output and International Migration datasets to build the network representation for capital and labor of 63 economies during 10 years. We then examine the role of social capital measures as drivers of the TFP adopting an extended Cobb-Douglass production function and addressing potential issues such as multicollinearity, reverse causality and non-linear effects. Our results indicate that social capital in the factors of production networks can significantly drive economic outputs through TFP.

Evidence from a long-term experiment that collective risks change social norms and promote cooperation.

Social norms can help solve pressing societal challenges, from mitigating climate change to reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Despite their relevance, how norms shape cooperation among strangers remains insufficiently understood. Influential theories also suggest that the level of threat faced by different societies plays a key role in the strength of the norms that cultures evolve. Still little causal evidence has been collected. Here we deal with this dual challenge using a 30-day collective-risk social dilemma experiment to measure norm change in a controlled setting. We ask whether a looming risk of collective loss increases the strength of cooperative social norms that may avert it. We find that social norms predict cooperation, causally affect behavior, and that higher risk leads to stronger social norms that are more resistant to erosion when the risk changes. Taken together, our results demonstrate the causal effect of social norms in promoting cooperation and their role in making behavior resilient in the face of exogenous change.