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

Abstract

Socioeconomic 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.

Students, Temporary Workers and Co-Op Workers: An Experimental Investigation on Social Preferences

“…For instance, using a public good game, Gächter and Herrmann [40] show that students are less prosocial than rural and urban citizens, and Cardenas [41] shows that they extract more resources than rural villagers in a common pool resources experiment. Similar findings are observed when comparing students with workers, such as nurses [5], bicycle messengers [8], shrimp fishermen [13], and white-collar workers [42]. Previous studies suggest that students seem to be at the lower bound of other-regarding preferences.…”

Trust and in-group favoritism in a culture of crime

“…First, the Palermo metropolitan area is characterized by relative uniformity in ethnicity, religion, language, and wealth levels, as well as by extremely low levels of inter-neighborhood migration. This is in contrast to prior studies of regions within countries, which often have di↵erent local institutions, dialects, religions, and wealth levels that might also explain variation in trust (Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011;Tabellini, 2010;Bigoni et al, 2013). Our comparison of experimentally-measured trust levels across neighborhoods in the same city is closest to recent work by Falk and Zehnder (2013).…”

“…Yet even within countries with common institutions, we observe regional di↵erences in both general trust and in-group favoritism. Italy, for example, has wellknown regional di↵erences in trust between the South and the North (Banfield, 1958;Putnam et al, 1994;Guiso et al, 2006;Bigoni et al, 2013). Similar within-country variation in trust has been documented in Africa (Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011), Europe (Tabellini, 2010;Dohmen et al, 2012), and Israel (Fershtman and Gneezy, 2001).…”

Temporary Workers are Not Free-Riders: An Experimental Investigation

“…After all, the recruiting agency which supplied the Temporary workers was originally established as a co-op and, although it (located within the Emilia-Romagna region) are characterized by high levels of social capital and generalized trust (Bigoni et al, 2013). This may have shaped in a similar way the behavior of both Temporary and Permanent workers, as well as that of the Students raised in Emilia-Romagna.…”