What explains the range of situations in which individuals cooperate? This paper studies a model where individuals respond to incentives but are also influenced by norms of good conduct inherited from earlier generations. Parents rationally choose what values to transmit to their offspring, and...

We discuss a simple model of choices of joint consumption by a working couple who place maintenance of their marriage (relationship) above all else. Any proposal made by one partner seeking to provide maximal utility to the other so as to preserve the marriage, in the case where preferences of...

The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...

We explore the interrelationships between various measures of cultural distance. We first discuss measures of genetic distance, used in the recent economics literature to capture the degree of relatedness between countries. We next describe several classes of measures of lin-guistic, religious,...

In this paper, we provide evidence that expanding firms tend to serve new markets which are geographically close and culturally related to their prior export destinations. We quantify the impact of this spatial pattern using a Chinese firm-level data set. To ensure an exogenous set of potential...