During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on the euro crisis differ between Protestants and...

Building on work funded by the ESPON 2013 Program, the paper analyses the regional trajectories of development of a "creative workforce" among its active population against regional economic growth, measured by changes in per capita GDP over the period 2001-2008 in 317 NUTS2 regions of the ESPON...

This paper reflects on a "cultural industry model" with important potential for local development, which is the network of independent cultural producers of Brazilian slums. The landscape of favelas is unique: plagued by poverty and crime, they have come to encapsulate the worst aspects of...

Defining quality of life (qol) at personal or societal level is a difficult process which largely depends on the selected determining factors. Among the various parameters having been proposed as qol determinants, leisure and culture issues have only recently found their place, as they had long...

This paper introduces cultural gravity as a new concept for analyzing socio-economic disparities among immigrants. It tests the existence of cultural gravity effects on the geographic concentration and human capital productivity of immigrants. Using cultural distance as a proxy for the local...

Do Empires affect human values and behavior long after their demise? In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone border of the Habsburg Empire have been sharing common formal institutions for 90 years now. We exploit this geographic discontinuity in a...

This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (forthcoming) - with respect to (a) their correlation with actual...

We investigate whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

There is an extensive literature examining the determinants of self-employment. These studies have mainly failed to account for the differences in entrepreneurial spirit across countries. This paper explores the role of culture in self-employment by exploiting variation in historical...

This paper studies the effects of differences in worldviews on parents? attitudes towards their children. We use unique German survey data containing questions on worldviews, religion, parental behavior, and socioeconomic variables. Our empirical evidence suggests that people with stronger...