Religion and beliefs in the supernatural are present in all societies. Yet, studies about the spread of small-scale supernatural belief systems remain quite limited. In this work, we test the anthropological hypothesis that historical dependence on pastoralism favored the adoption of customs...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...

In the standard neoclassical model consumers use all the available information and the demand for goods depends exclusively on preferences and prices whereas other spurious information do not play any role. In the market for books, we investigate if – in contrast to the standard model – the...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...

Recent studies by economists exploring the nexus between culture and fertility have focused on cultural transmission from the origin country rather than the origin family. Our paper extends this avenue of research by investigating how family-specific ‘cultural transmission’ can affect...

With globalization, the size of migration and the value of ethnicity is rising. Also Cyprus undergoes a strong process of change while experiencing large inflows of migration. The paper investigates the challenges and the potentials of migration from a European Union perspective. It advocates...

The European Union’s strategy to raise employment is confronted with very low work participation among many minority ethnic groups, in particular among immigrants. This study examines the potential of immigrants’ identification with the home and host country ethnicity to explain that...

The structure of family relationships influences economic behavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from the World Value Survey regarding the role of the family and the love and respect that children need to have for their parents for over 70...

Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the Habsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens' trust in local public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the...

This article sheds light on the important differences in self-declared happiness across countries of equivalent affluence. It hinges on the different happiness statements of natives and immigrants in a set of European countries to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus...