[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eui/euiwps/eco2013-04.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Cooperation Hidden Frontiers: The Behavioral Foundations of the Italian North-South Divide

Author

Listed:
  • Maria Bigoni
  • Stefania Bortolotti
  • Marco Casari
  • Diego Gambetta
  • Francesca Pancotto
Abstract
Socio-economic performance differs not only across countries but within countries too and can persist even after religion, language, and formal institutions are long shared. One interpretation of these disparities is that successful regions are characterized by higher levels of trust, and, more generally, of cooperation. Here we study a classic case of within-country disparities, the Italian North-South divide, to find out whether people exhibit geographically distinct abilities to cooperate independently of many other factors and whence these differences emerge. Through an experiment in four Italian cities, we study the behavior of a sample of the general population toward trust and contributions to the common good. We find that trust and contributions vary in unison, and diminish moving from North to South. This regional gap cannot be attributed to payoffs from cooperation or to institutions, formal or informal, that may vary across Italy, as the experimental methodology silences their impact. The gap is also independent of risk and other-regarding preferences which we measure experimentally, suggesting that the lower ability to cooperate we find in the South is not due to individual "moral" flaws. The gap could originate from emergent collective properties, such as different social norms and the expectations they engender. The absence of convergence in behavior during the last 150 years, since Italy was unified, further suggests that these norms can persist overtime. Using a millenniumlong dataset, we explore whether the quality of past political institutions and the frequency of wars could explain the emergence of these differences in norms.

Suggested Citation

  • Maria Bigoni & Stefania Bortolotti & Marco Casari & Diego Gambetta & Francesca Pancotto, 2013. "Cooperation Hidden Frontiers: The Behavioral Foundations of the Italian North-South Divide," Economics Working Papers ECO2013/04, European University Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2013/04
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/27054/ECO_2013_04.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephen Knack & Philip Keefer, 1997. "Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(4), pages 1251-1288.
    2. Luigi Guiso & Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales, 2007. "Social Capital as Good Culture," NBER Working Papers 13712, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. La Porta, Rafael, et al, 1997. "Trust in Large Organizations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(2), pages 333-338, May.
    4. Luigi Guiso & Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales, 2004. "The Role of Social Capital in Financial Development," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(3), pages 526-556, June.
    5. Ernst Fehr & Klaus M. Schmidt, 1999. "A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(3), pages 817-868.
    6. Guido Tabellini, 2010. "Culture and Institutions: Economic Development in the Regions of Europe," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 8(4), pages 677-716, June.
    7. Axel Ockenfels & Gary E. Bolton, 2000. "ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(1), pages 166-193, March.
    8. Alan S. Blinder, 1973. "Wage Discrimination: Reduced Form and Structural Estimates," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 8(4), pages 436-455.
    9. Urs Fischbacher, 2007. "z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 10(2), pages 171-178, June.
    10. Catherine C. Eckel & Philip J. Grossman, 2008. "Forecasting Risk Attitudes: An Experimental Study Using Actual and Forecast Gamble Choices," Monash Economics Working Papers archive-01, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    11. Maarten J. Voors & Eleonora E. M. Nillesen & Philip Verwimp & Erwin H. Bulte & Robert Lensink & Daan P. Van Soest, 2012. "Violent Conflict and Behavior: A Field Experiment in Burundi," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(2), pages 941-964, April.
    12. Luigi Guiso & Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales, 2008. "Alfred Marshall Lecture Social Capital as Good Culture," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 6(2-3), pages 295-320, 04-05.
    13. Nathan Nunn & Leonard Wantchekon, 2011. "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(7), pages 3221-3252, December.
    14. Luigi Guiso & Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales, 2010. "Civic Capital as the Missing Link," NBER Working Papers 15845, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. M. Bigoni & S. Bortolotti & M. Casari & D. Gambetta, 2012. "Trustworthy by Convention," Working Papers wp827, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Meier, Stephan & Pierce, Lamar & Vaccaro, Antonino, 2014. "Trust and In-Group Favoritism in a Culture of Crime," IZA Discussion Papers 8169, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Meier, Stephan & Pierce, Lamar & Vaccaro, Antonino & La Cara, Barbara, 2016. "Trust and in-group favoritism in a culture of crime," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 132(PA), pages 78-92.
    3. Traviss Cassidy & Mark Dincecco & Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato, 2015. "The Economic Legacy of Warfare: Evidence from European Regions," Working Papers 6/2015, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, revised Jul 2015.
    4. repec:ial:wpaper:7/2013 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Tam Kiet Vuong & Ho Fai Chan & Benno Torgler, 2021. "Competing social identities and intergroup discrimination: Evidence from a framed field experiment with high school students in Vietnam," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(12), pages 1-27, December.
    6. John, Katrin & Thomsen, Stephan L., 2015. "School-track environment or endowment: What determines different other-regarding behavior across peer groups?," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 122-141.
    7. Davide Dragone & Fabio Galeotti & Raimondello Orsini, 2015. "Students, Temporary Workers and Co-Op Workers: An Experimental Investigation on Social Preferences," Games, MDPI, vol. 6(2), pages 1-45, May.
    8. David K Levine & Andrea Mattozzi & Salvatore Modica, 2022. "Social Mechanisms and Political Economy: When Lobbyists Succeed, Pollsters Fail and Populists Win," Levine's Working Paper Archive 11694000000000148, David K. Levine.
    9. Mark Dincecco & Massimiliano Onorato, 2013. "Military conflict and the economic rise of urban Europe," Working Papers 14006, Economic History Society.
    10. David K. Levine, 2021. "The Reputation Trap," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(6), pages 2659-2678, November.
    11. D. Dragone & F. Galeotti & R. Orsini, 2013. "Temporary Workers Are Not Free-Riders: An Experimental Investigation," Working Papers wp915, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    12. Giacomo Degli Antoni & Gianluca Grimalda, 2013. "Optimistic expectations or other-regarding preferences? Analysing the determinants of trust among association members," Working Papers 2013/21, Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain).
    13. Fabio Sabatini & Francesco Sarracino & Eiji Yamamura, 2014. "Social norms on rent seeking and preferences for redistribution," Econometica Working Papers wp55, Econometica.
    14. Rattaphon Wuthisatian & Mark Pingle & Mark Nichols, 2017. "To support trust and trustworthiness: punish, communicate, both, neither?," Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy, Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE), vol. 1(1), pages 61-68, February.
    15. Drew Fudenberg & David K Levine, 2016. "Whither Game Theory?," Levine's Working Paper Archive 786969000000001307, David K. Levine.
    16. Succurro, Marianna, 2014. "Intangible assets finance: a complementary or substitution effect between external and internal channels? Evidence from the Italian divide," MPRA Paper 57247, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Algan, Yann & Cahuc, Pierre, 2014. "Trust, Growth, and Well-Being: New Evidence and Policy Implications," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 2, pages 49-120, Elsevier.
    2. Bracco, E. & De Paola, M. & Green, C.P., 2015. "Long lasting differences in civic capital: Evidence from a unique immigration event in Italy," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 160-173.
    3. Sangnier, Marc, 2013. "Does trust favor macroeconomic stability?," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 653-668.
    4. Schwerter, Frederik & Zimmermann, Florian, 2020. "Determinants of trust: The role of personal experiences," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 413-425.
    5. Andreas Lichter & Max Löffler & Sebastian Siegloch, 2021. "The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 19(2), pages 741-789.
    6. Pevzner, Mikhail & Xie, Fei & Xin, Xiangang, 2015. "When firms talk, do investors listen? The role of trust in stock market reactions to corporate earnings announcements," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(1), pages 190-223.
    7. Matthias Buerker & Gaetano Alfredo Minerva, 2013. "Civic Capital and the Vertical Integration of Service Provision: Evidence from Italy," ERSA conference papers ersa13p1209, European Regional Science Association.
    8. Yann Algan & Clément Malgouyres & Thierry Mayer & Mathias Thoenig, 2022. "The Economic Incentives of Cultural Transmission: Spatial Evidence from Naming Patterns Across France," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 132(642), pages 437-470.
    9. Corrado Giulietti & Enrico Rettore & Sara Tonini, 2023. "The chips are down: the influence of family on children’s trust formation," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 36(1), pages 211-233, January.
    10. Massa, Massimo & li, zhe & xu, niahang & Zhang, Hong, 2016. "The Impact of Sin Culture: Evidence from Earning Management and Alcohol Consumption in China," CEPR Discussion Papers 11475, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    11. Fuchs-Schündeln, N. & Hassan, T.A., 2016. "Natural Experiments in Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 923-1012, Elsevier.
    12. Della Lena, Sebastiano & Manzoni, Elena & Panebianco, Fabrizio, 2023. "On the transmission of guilt aversion and the evolution of trust," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 765-793.
    13. Perez-Truglia, Ricardo, 2018. "Markets, trust and cultural biases: evidence from eBay," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 17-27.
    14. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/33o86cn6qp83dot08iir97915s is not listed on IDEAS
    15. Štěpán Mikula & Tommaso Reggiani & Fabio Sabatini, 2023. "The long-term impact of religion on social capital: lessons from post-war Czechoslovakia," MUNI ECON Working Papers 2023-03, Masaryk University.
    16. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/33o86cn6qp83dot08iir97915s is not listed on IDEAS
    17. Gupta, Atul & Raman, Kartik & Shang, Chenguang, 2018. "Social capital and the cost of equity," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 102-117.
    18. Xu, Xu & Jin, Xin, 2018. "The autocratic roots of social distrust," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 362-380.
    19. Yann Algan & Pierre Cahuc, 2014. "Trust, Well-Being and Growth: New Evidence and Policy Implications," Post-Print hal-01169659, HAL.
    20. Luigi Guiso & Paola Sapienza & Luigi Zingales, 2016. "Long-Term Persistence," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 14(6), pages 1401-1436, December.
    21. Philippe Aghion & Yann Algan & Pierre Cahuc & Andrei Shleifer, 2010. "Regulation and Distrust," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(3), pages 1015-1049.
    22. Atul Gupta & Kristina Minnick, 2022. "Social capital and managerial opportunism: Evidence from option backdating," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 45(3), pages 579-605, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Trust; social norms; experiments; long-term persistence; conflicts; institutions.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2013/04. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Cécile Brière (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deiueit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.