What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures,...

While observational evidence suggests that people behave more prosocially towards members of their own ethnic group, many laboratory studies fail to find this effect. One possible explanation is that coethnic preference only emerges during times of stress. To test this hypothesis, we...

Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a society's oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine...

In this Handbook chapter, I examine how integrating ethnographic and folklore records has shaped research on culture and economics in the 21st century. Advances in text analysis techniques and the incorporation of historical and satellite data have transformed the field. I explore how George...