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SUMMARYIndicators of past wealth –'old money'– typically bestow prestige and contribute to high status. Nobility, a culturally determined, hereditary status marker, might act as such an indicator, and thereby serve as a vehicle for the cultural transmission of economic standing. As an institution, nobility is an anachronism. Status, however, plays an important role in most societies, making individuals allocate valuable resources to status‐enhancing activities. This suggests that even though nobility no longer entails formal privileges, it may continue to be coveted as a status marker. We examine the relative performance of nobility in the marriage market. Data on Swedish marriages provide an opportunity to test the hypothesis that the probability of hypergamy (marrying 'up') in terms of wealth increases when an individual belongs to the nobility. Our main finding is a significantly higher probability of hypergamy for members of the nobility, controlling for own wealth and other covariates. This 'nobility premium' is sizeable. The effect is statistically significant and robust to a number of different measures of hypergamy. This finding has implications for the intergenerational transmission of inequality, and for the longevity of the institution of nobility itself.

We study the experimental play of the repeated prisoner's dilemma when intended actions are implemented with noise. In treatments where cooperation is an equilibrium, subjects cooperate substantially more than in treatments without cooperative equilibria. In all settings there was considerable strategic diversity, indicating that subjects had not fully learned the distribution of play. Furthermore, cooperative strategies yielded higher payoffs than uncooperative strategies in the treatments with cooperative equilibria. In these treatments successful strategies were "lenient" in not retaliating for the first defection, and many were "forgiving" in trying to return to cooperation after inflicting a punishment. (JEL C72, C73, D81)