Daniele Nosenzo

Daniele Nosenzo joined the School of Economics of the University of Nottingham in 2010 as a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He is currently an Associate Professor in Economics and he is Co-Director of the Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx).

CV
 

Abstract:
Social norms are known to exert a powerful influence on behaviour. Much theoretical attention has been paid to the question of whether, in determining behaviour, laws and norms are purely substitutes, or whether laws work partly by exerting a causal effect on norms. This paper provides an empirical contribution to the literature. We run an experiment to measure social norms, using the incentivised mechanism introduced by Krupka and Weber (2013). By exploiting situations in which the legality of an action is determined by a cut-off point, we are able to cleanly measure the independent effect of legality on the social appropriateness of various types of behaviour. Results show a consistently strong effect of laws on norms. Moreover, we find this is the case both in a country with strong legal institutions, the UK, and in a country with weaker legal institutions, China.