There have been significant achievements in all three areas of the SOWELL project, which have led to some important conclusions for advancing the research on the theory and empirics of social preferences and well-being
PART 1 – Big Data: New Behavioural Measures and Analysis of Social Preferences and Well-Being
By using large-scale behavioural measures made possible by the Big Data revolution, we have been able to develop new theoretical and empirical foundations of trust and well-being. The results of this line of research have been published in the following papers :
o “Well-Being through the Lens of the Internet”, (in PloS one),
o “Trust and its Determinants: Evidence from the Trustlab Experiment” (submitted to Nature Human Behavior)
o “Trust, Social Progress and Well-Being” (in Handbook of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress)
o “Social Exchange and the Reciprocity Roller Coaster: Evidence from the Life and Death of Virtual Teams” (forthcoming in Organization Science 2021)
PART 2 – Foundations of Social Preferences and Well-Being
In the second part of the ERC, I investigated the foundations of social preferences, with a particular focus on the role of individual life experience, by using both natural and laboratory experiments. The three corresponding papers are:
o “Childhood Environmental Harshness Predicts Coordinated Health and Reproductive Strategies” (in Evolution and Human Behavior)
o “Childhood harshness predicts long-lasting leader preferences” (in Evolution and Human Behavior)
o “Friendship Networks, Trust and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians” (submitted to Review of Economic Studies)
PART 3 – New paradigms to evaluate the effect of policies
This last part of my project was by far the most extensive in scope and intensity. Here we used both randomized control trials to examine the impact of non-cognitive skills development on academic, professional, economic and other outcomes and large-scale survey implementation to understand the role of trust in voting preferences and in citizens' behaviours and attitudes during crisis situations. The following publications have thus far resulted from this part of the SOWELL project:
o “The Impact of Childhood Social Skills and Self-Control Training on Economic and non-Economic Outcomes: evidence from a randomized experiment using administrative data” (forthcoming in American Economic Review)
o “Association Between Childhood Behaviors and Adult Employment Earnings” (JAMA Psychiatry)
o “Behaviors in kindergarten are associated with trajectories of long-term welfare receipt: A 30-year population-based study” (Development and Psychopathology)
o “Inattention in boys from low-income backgrounds predicts welfare receipt: a 30-year prospective study” (Psychological Medicine)
o “The Role of Mindset in Education: A Large-Scale Field Experiment in Disadvantaged Schools” (Working Paper Sciences Po)
o “Les origines du populisme” (Book for La République des idées)
o “Les Français, le Bien-Etre et l’Argent (Editions de la rue d’Ulm)
o “The European Trust Crisis and the Rise of Populism” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity)
o “The rise of populism and the collapse of the left-right paradigm: Lessons from the 2017 French presidential election” (CEPR working paper)
o “Trust in Scientists in Times of Pandemic: Panel Evidence from 12 countries” (forthcoming in PNAS)
