This paper studies the transition of contract enforcement institutions. The prevalence of relational contracts, low legal quality, strong cultural preference for personalistic relationships, low social mobility, and highly unequal endowment form a cluster of mutually reinforcing institutions that hinder economic development. The cultural element per se does not necessarily reduce social welfare...

We model virtue as an asset on the marriage market: since men value virginity in prospective mates, preserving their virtue increases girls’ chances of getting a "good" husband, and therefore allows for upward social mobility. Consistent with some historical and anthropological evidence, we find that the diffusion (and the social value) of virginity, across societies and over time, can be deter...

This paper analyzes subjective evaluations of the wage distribution and preferences for redistribution using Swiss data from the International Social Survey Program. Preferences for redistribution are conceptualized and measured as the discrepancy between the perceived and the just level of wage inequality. The results suggest that there is both considerable support for equalisation of wages an...

Using the information content of surnames to measure social mobility, it is shown that the true intergenerational correlation of social status is in the order of 0.7-0.8, much higher than is estimated by conventional methods. This intergenerational correlation is similar across dramatically different societies: medieval England, modern England, pre-industrial Sweden, modern Sweden, the USA, Qui...

Using rare surnames we follow the socio-economic status of initial groups of rich, middling, and poor in England from 1800 until 2012. We measure social status through wealth, education, occupation, membership in political elites, and average age at death. Our method allows unbiased estimates of mobility rates. Mobility rates are much lower than conventionally estimated, including the most rece...

Why does ethnicity have varied effects on socioeconomic outcomes, such as educational achievement, for different national-origin groups, even after holding constant key socioeconomic and contextual factors? Why do the children of Chinese and Korean immigrants in the United States, regardless of socioeconomic backgrounds, excel and succeed in the educational arena in disproportionately large num...

This paper considers optimal social insurance in a dynamic moral hazard economy. The existing literature has focussed on environments in which a planner and a population of agents share the same discount factor. A key finding is that agents are then almost surely immiserated; their welfare is driven to its lowest bound. Such immiseration requires a social commitment to treat (almost) everyone a...

Human beings care a lot about being viewed as ‘smart’. This paper defines social status as the public beliefs about one’s ‘smartness’ inferred from one’s publicly observed social mobility experience. This status motive can easily generate multiple equilibria based upon self-fulfilling beliefs. It also tends to amplify the inequality of economic success between agents with different social origi...

What is the true rate of social mobility? Modern one-generation studies suggest considerable regression to the mean for all measures of status – wealth, income, occupation and education across a variety of societies. The β that links status across generations is in the order of 0.2-0.5. In that case inherited surnames will quickly lose any information about social status. Using surnames this pa...

This study explicitly links processes of anticipatory socialization to social mobility and reproduction. An examination of the socializing messages exchanged between blue-collar parents (n = 41) and their children (n = 25) demonstrate that family-based messages about work and career seldom occur in straightforward, unambiguous ways. Instead, messages take several paths (direct, indirect, ambien...