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To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464934
This paper aims to show that culture is an important determinant of the effectiveness of formal democratic institutions, such as elections. We collect new data to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations and the history of electoral reforms in Chinese villages. We use the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457609
This paper investigates how Confucianism affects individual decision making in Taiwan and in China. We found that … loving, less loss averse, and more impatient after being primed with Confucianism, whereas Taiwanese subjects became … significantly less present-based and were inclined to be more trustworthy after being primed by Confucianism. Combining the evidence …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012459046
Can informing people of high rates of community support for social distancing encourage them to do more of it? Our Mozambican study population underestimated the rate of community support for social distancing, believing support to be only 69%, while the true share was 98%. In theory, informing...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012510530
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012481079
Recent theories of the Long Divergence between Middle Eastern and Western European economies focus on Middle Eastern (over-)reliance on religious legitimacy, use of slave soldiers, and persistence of restrictive proscriptions of religious (Islamic) law. These theories take as exogenous the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482703
Using micro data on more than 130,000 individuals from 69 countries, we analyze the extent to which joblessness of the individuals and the prevailing unemployment rate in the country impact perceptions of the effectiveness of democracy. We find that personal joblessness experience translates...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462659
This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462807
This paper assesses the role of ideas in economic change, combining economic and historical analysis with insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology. Belief systems shape the system of categories ("pre-confirmatory bias") and perceptions (confirmatory bias), and are themselves...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462860
Flexible labor markets require geographically mobile workers to be efficient. Otherwise firms can take advantage of the immobility of workers and extract rents at the expense of workers. In cultures with strong family ties, moving away from home is costly. Thus, to limit the rents of firms and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462908