Can some acts of violence be explained by a society's quot;culturequot;? 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...

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find greater integration in fractionalized...

We examine whether shared collective experiences can help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams' victories in sub- Saharan Africa. Combining individual survey data with information on official matches played between 2000 and 2015, we find that individuals...

In this paper we use New Immigrant Survey data to investigate the impact of immigrant women's own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country to provide evidence on the role of human capital and culture in affecting their labor supply and wages in the United...

Religions have little to say about shareholders but have much to say about creditors. We find that the origin of a country's legal system is more important than its religion and language in explaining shareholder rights. However, a country's principal religion helps predict the cross-sectional...

We use variation in historical state centralization to examine the impact of institutions on cultural norms. The Kuba Kingdom, established in Central Africa in the early 17th century by King Shyaam, had more developed state institutions than the other independent villages and chieftaincies in...

This paper examines evidence on the role of assimilation versus source country culture in influencing immigrant women's behavior in the United States—looking both over time with immigrants' residence in the United States and across immigrant generations. It focuses particularly on labor supply...

We investigate the empirical relationship between ethnicity and culture, defined as a vector of traits reflecting norms, attitudes and preferences. Using surveys of individual values in 76 countries, we find that ethnic identity is a significant predictor of cultural values, yet that...

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture....

We use micro data from the European Social Survey to investigate the impact of “culture of leisure” and taxes on labor force participation and hours worked of second-generation immigrants who reside in 26 European countries. These individuals are born in Europe, and they have been exposed to...