Corporate success stories often resemble a snowball. We show how initial luck in hiring talented people, the resulting technological advantage, superior corporate culture, and statusseeking by workers and by consumers can make small initial differences generate large differences over time.

Effective organizations are able not only to coordinate their members on efficient strategies but also to adapt members' strategies to unforeseen change in an efficient manner. We explore whether part of organizational culture - namely, relational contracts that facilitate both coordination and...

This paper analyzes to what extent gender culture affects gender gap in employment. Drawing on Italian data, we measure culture by building two indices: one based on individual attitudes, as done in the existing literature; one based on firms' attitudes. Firms' beliefs, which express their set of...

I analyze a model in which a principal offers a contract to an agent and can influence the agent’s marginal return of effort by the choice of the project mission. The principal's and the agents' mission preferences are misaligned, and the agents have unobservable intrinsic motivation levels. I...

We examine both theoretically and empirically how migration affects cultural change in home and host countries. Our theoretical model integrates various compositional and cultural transmission mechanisms of migration-based cultural change for which it delivers distinctive testable predictions on...

What happens when immigrant girls are given increased opportunities to integrate into the workplace and society, but their parents value more traditional cultural outcomes? Building on Akerlof and Kranton's identity framework (2000), we construct a simple theoretical model which shows how...

The impact of culture on non-kin cooperation has been singled out as critical for economic activity. However, causal evidence of culture's influence on cooperation remains scant. In this paper we provide such evidence, focusing on two key components of culture: preferences and beliefs. Adopting...

This paper explores intergenerational transmission of culture and the consequences of a plausible assumption: that people care not only for their children's culture but also for how their grand-children are raised. This departs from the previous literature which, without exception, assumes...

Using hand-collected data spanning more than a decade on European banks' sovereign debt portfolios, we show that the trust of residents of a bank's countries of operation in the residents of a potential target country of investment has a positive, statistically significant, and economically...