Leadership and Cooperation in Groups – Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract

We investigate the willingness of actual leaders to enforce organizational norms in a third party punishment game and the effect this has on naturally occurring outcomes of forest commons management. We find that most leaders in our sample do not punish, but those who do target violations of norms of equality and efficiency. A minority of leaders punish anti-socially, i.e. punish those who cooperate. Our results reveal a significant positive effect on forest outcome of those leaders who punish violations of both equality and efficiency. Leaders who focus on equality alone have no significant effect compared to baseline, i.e. to leaders who do not punish. Finally, the effect of anti-social leaders on forest outcome is strongly negative.