UC Berkeley

This dissertation incorporates two major themes from behavioral economics and political economy. The first theme focuses on how social forces—such as culture, norms, and identity—shape economically meaningful behavior. This work builds on key theories from psychology and economics that embody intuitive ideas: we compare what we have relative to our peers or expectations, and are constrained by social norms yet impose them on others as well. The first two chapters explore these ideas in historically or politically consequential contexts. They evaluate the historic role of commercial television in setting consumer expectations and study the motives behind pressuring others to follow norms on political civic duty.

The second theme in this dissertation moves onto governments as decision-makers and studies the determinants of policy adoption across the United States. The first chapter within this theme describes the general dynamic patterns of policy diffusion for a broad set of U.S. state-level policies. The second then focuses on municipal governments in their adoption of non-partisan, low-cost “nudge” interventions.