Showing 1 - 10 of 93
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 international soccer (football) players in the European …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464681
Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits, a significant component of the differences in income inequality across societies can be attributed to variation in societal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014337813
Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data -...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014372447
What drives change in a society's values? From Marx to modernization theory, scholars have identified a connection between structural transformation and social change. To understand how changes in a society's dominant mode of production affect its dominant values, we examine the case of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014372465
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014512074
Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013462742
Evidence suggests that the prehistoric Out of Africa Migration has impacted the degree of intra-population genetic and phenotypic diversity across the globe. This paper provides the first evidence that this migration has shaped cultural diversity. Leveraging a folklore catalogue of 958 oral...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014287375
Moral universalism, the extent to which individuals exhibit similar altruism and trust towards in-group and out-group members, varies widely across societies. We test the hypothesis from anthropology that the requirements of transhumant pastoralism - a livelihood in which populations seasonally...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013334476
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013362017
This paper studies the effects of threat on convergence to local culture and economic assimilation of refugees … economically. However, while refugees assigned to more hostile regions converge to local culture more quickly, they do not exhibit … faster economic assimilation. Our evidence suggests that refugees exert more assimilation effort in response to local threat …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013362035