Economic Sociology Seminars

Jason Greenberg, Cornell, SC Johnson College of Business

Hubris and Humility: Gender, Confidence, and Entrepreneurial Persistence in Crowdfunding

Research Summary: The decision to become an entrepreneur is dependent on how a potential founder interprets signals of their probable success or failure. Prior research has shown that hubris increases the probability of pursuing entrepreneurship, as nascent entrepreneurs interpret signals more favorably than is warranted. Drawing on the “male hubris, female humility effect,” which holds that women assess their own ability more conservatively than men, we theorize that gender differences in baseline confidence and in the perceived opportunity to act on market signals may explain part of the gender gap in entrepreneurship. We argue that women are less likely to attempt to raise funding a second time than men when they have succeeded or failed in their first fundraising attempts. Using a dataset of approximately 100,000 projects in crowdfunding in which aspiring founders attempted to raise funding more than once, we find evidence supporting this prediction. Moreover, we find that this gap between men and women widens as first-attempt performance improves on either side of the funding threshold—as failures become more marginal and as successes grow larger. To probe the mechanisms underlying these patterns, we complement the archival evidence with a pre-registered online experiment (N ~1,000) in which aspiring entrepreneurs developed an idea with the aid of an AI assistant (GPT), entered it into an experimental startup pitch competition, and were randomly assigned to receive signals of success, failure, or near (“close”) failure. Men and women drew similar inferences from a close failure, but differed in baseline self-assessments; men rated their entrepreneurial ability and idea quality more favorably in every condition, while women reported less available time to work on the entrepreneurial idea, a structural disparity we document. In the discussion, we consider the aggregate economic implications of these decisions made by aspiring male and female founders, as well as possible extensions to this research.

Daniel McFarland, Stanford University

TBD

Robert Braun, University of California, Berkeley

Religious Frontiers and Xenophobia: Evidence from a survey of villages in Weimar Germany

This paper argues that religious frontiers foster anxieties about strangers who exist between communities and blur established social boundaries. Spatial proximity to religious borders simultaneously intensifies local cohesion and perceptions of external threat, creating fertile conditions for collective fears directed at liminal outsiders. To develop this argument, the paper draws on a newly assembled database on folklore and religion covering roughly 20,000 towns and villages in religiously divided Germany during the 1930s. Spatial econometric analyses show that inhabitants of Protestant towns located near Catholic communities—and vice versa—were significantly more likely to tell children stories featuring xenophobic bogeymen, especially Jews and Roma. Instrumental-variable models using sixteenth-century religious boundaries, nearest-neighbor matching, panel analyses, sensitivity tests, and fine-grained fixed effects help address endogeneity concerns and strengthen causal inference. Consistent with the theory, frontier effects were strongest in areas where perceived religious threat was particularly acute. In such settings, frontier communities became unusually cohesive, disciplined, and organized around practices of collective protection. The findings illuminate how identity politics and state formation shape the emotional and moral worlds of citizens living at social frontiers, teaching them to view strangers through the lens of fear and suspicion. More broadly, the paper shows how collective anxieties emerge from systems of social classification: communities facing heightened uncertainty become especially fearful of ambiguous figures who blur the symbolic boundaries upon which local order and cohesion depend. In this way, efforts to secure integration and moral clarity at the seams of society can unintentionally generate new forms of exclusion and xenophobia.