Seminar in Public Economics - Who Wants to be the Hired Gun? Experimental Evidence from Matrilineal and Patriarchal Societies
Time
Monday, 2. December 2019
17:00 - 18:30
Location
F425
Organizer
Speaker:
Marcela Ibañez Diaz (University of Göttingen)
Who Wants to be the Hired Gun? Experimental Evidence from Matrilineal and Patriarchal Societies in India
(with Debosree Banerjee, Gerhard Riener and Meike Wollni)
Abstract
Societies that set norms restraining opportunistic behavior can escape the tragedy of the commons and sustain cooperation. Strikingly though, in most societies women remain under-represented in formal institutions that enforce social norms. For example, women represent less than 20 percent of judges in the Supreme Court and 12 percent of the police force in the United States. In developing countries, these differences are even larger. This paper investigates the supply-side factors that affect the willingness to act as a "third party punisher'' or the party that sanctions bad behavior. We consider the origin of such differences and find that nurture as opposed to nature explains the gender gap. In the matrilineal Khasi tribes women are more willing to enforce social norms than men while the opposite is true in the patriarchal Santal Tribes in India. Our results indicate that changes in the institutional environment can promote gender equity. In particular, anonymity and reduced retaliation possibilities close the gender gap in the willingness to act as third party punisher.