New technologies affect cultural consumption in several ways. Technological change lowers the cost of cultural consumption, inducing substitution and/or increasing demand, in both cases increasing consumer welfare. Technological change can also impact dynamically, inducing increased variety...

This paper examines how the concept of embedded culture played a transformative role in the ongoing cultural revolution within economics and business. We trace the field's shift from the 20th-century concept of homo economicus universalis to an approach incorporating cultural embeddedness in...

Culture - the set of socially transmitted values and beliefs held by individuals - has important implications for a wide variety of economic outcomes. Both the causes and consequences of culture have been the subject of work in Historical Political Economy. I first outline several theories on...

Attention to art and culture goes far back in the history of economic thought. In the seventeenth century those activities were viewed suspiciously as likely to be either wasteful extravagances of the aristocracy, or dangerous distractions for the working classes. Eighteenth century economic...

We study aggregate efficiency when households have heterogeneous preferences and outcomes. We generalize the consumption-equivalent variation of Lucas (1987) to a multi-agent setting, asking: how much can the consumption-possibility set shrink while keeping every agent at least as well off as in...

In a model of evolution driven by conflict between societies more powerful states have an advantage. When the influence of outsiders is small we show that this results in a tendency to hegemony. In a simple example in which institutions differ in their "exclusiveness" we find that these...

Culture shapes how policies are made and how people react to them. This chapter explores how culture and development policy affect each other. First, we provide evidence that cultural mismatch -- specifically a mismatch between project manager background and the location of project...

This chapter reviews the literature on the relationship between culture and political preferences. We distinguish conceptually between the direct cultural transmission of political ideology and the transmission of more primitive preferences and beliefs that influence preferences over policies,...