Can some acts of violence be explained by a society's "culture"? Scholars have found it hard to empirically disentangle the effects of culture, legal institutions, and poverty in driving violence. We address this problem by exploiting a natural experiment offered by the presence of thousands of...

The US trade war against China in 2018-2019 can either enhance or diminish the US soft power in China, depending on whether it is recognized as legitimate by Chinese citizens. We study how the viewership of US movies--an important element of the US soft power--is affected by the trade war,...

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find greater integration in fractionalized...

In World War I the Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, hoped to create a broad market for government bonds, the famous Liberty Loans, by following an aggressive policy of "capitalizing patriotism." He called on everyone from Wall Street bankers to the Boy Scouts to volunteer for the...

We examine whether shared collective experiences can help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams' victories in sub- Saharan Africa. Combining individual survey data with information on official matches played between 2000 and 2015, we find that individuals...

Nations stay together when citizens share enough values and preferences and can communicate with each other. Homogeneity amongst people can be built with education, teaching a common language, building infrastructure for easier travel, but also by brute force such as prohibiting local cultures...

In this paper we use New Immigrant Survey data to investigate the impact of immigrant women's own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country to provide evidence on the role of human capital and culture in affecting their labor supply and wages in the United...

We employ a cross-country sample to examine whether cultural differences help explain gender compensation variations across corporate executives. The results show that the cultural differences, which are embedded in societies from long prior to the compensation decisions, provide significant...

Diversity poses fundamental challenges to state-building and development. We study the effects of one of post-colonial Africa's largest policy experiments -- the Tanzanian Ujamaa policy -- which attempted to address these challenges. Ujamaa aimed to create a national identity and consolidate...