Rugged individualism--the combination of individualism and anti-statism--is a prominent feature of American culture … with deep roots in the country's history of frontier settlement. Today, rugged individualism is more prevalent in counties … with greater total frontier experience (TFE) during the era of westward expansion. While individualism may be conducive to …

Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the Frontier Thesis and … demographics and greater individualism. Long after the closing of the frontier, counties with greater TFE exhibit more pervasive … individualism and opposition to redistribution. This pattern cuts across known divides in the U.S., including urban-rural and north …

We study the influence of agricultural labor intensity on individualism across U.S. counties. To measure historical … standard deviation in labor intensity is associated with a reduction of 0.2-0.4 standard deviations in individualism (as … geographic variation in individualism today …

We construct an endogenous growth model that includes a cultural variable along the dimension of individualism …-collectivism. The model predicts that more individualism leads to more innovation because of the social rewards associated with …. Collectivism leads to efficiency gains relative to individualism, but these gains are static, unlike the dynamic effect of …

We study the correlation between a belief concerning individualism and a measure of luck in the US during the period … individualism. We provide three short models that help interpret this correlation. One implication of this finding is that societies …

"individualism", the average support for all 4 values, a moral stance orthogonal to the left-right divide. We ground this measure of … individualism in the sociology of Emile Durkheim …