Xi Chen acknowledges generous Doctoral Research Grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University and precious data set provided by the Development Strategy and Governance Division at IFPRI. Conference Travel Grant provided by the Department of Applied Economics and...

We integrate a social norm which associates status to accumulation of capital and consumption into a simple model of endogenous growth. We show that societies which place a greater weight of cultural values on stock of accumulated capital as opposed to consumption will experience fast growth....

We consider a model that extends the scope of social preferences of the families of the migrants. This extension allows us to show that if some poor families receive remittances and social culture affects the composition of their consumption, then in presence of strong social inequality, poor...