We show that culture and diversity strongly influence welfare systems around the globe. To disentangle culture from institutions, we employ regional instruments as well as data on the prevalence of the pathogen Toxoplasma Gondii, linguistic differences, and the frequency of blood types. The...

This paper presents evidence from a large-scale study on gender differences in expected wages before labor market entry. Based on data for over 15,000 students, we document a significant and large gender gap in wage expectations that closely resembles actual wage differences, prevails across...

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...

According to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, global collective action is needed to stabilize "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous [our emphasis] anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The Framework Convention thus...

Two players with preferences distorted by the focusing effect (Koszegi and Szeidl, 2013) negotiate an agreement over several issues and one transfer. We show that, as long as their preferences are differentially distorted, an issue will be inefficiently left out of the agreement or inefficiently...

Casual observation suggests that cultural differences play an important role in business transactions, yet systematic evidence on this relationship is scarce. This paper provides a novel investigation of the effect of cultural distance on multinational firms' decisions to integrate their...

Ethnically diverse countries are more prone to conflict, but why do some groups engage in conflict while others do not? I show that civil conflict is explained by ethnic groups' cultural distance to the central government: an increase in cultural distance, proxied by linguistic distance,...

We describe a model of international, multidimensional policy coordination where countries can enter into selective and separate agreements with different partners along different policy dimensions. The model is used to examine the implications of negotiation tie-in - the requirement that...