infonet-economy

Social norms are usually neglected in economics, because they are to anlarge extent enforced through non-market interactions and difficult to isolatenempirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to work andnwe show that this norm has important economic effects. The stronger the norm, thenmore quickly unemployed people find a new job. This behavior can be explained bynutility differences, probably due to social pressure. Unemployed people arensignificantly less happy than employed people and their reduction in life satisfactionnis the larger, the stronger the norm is.