We show that culture and diversity strongly influence welfare systems around the globe. To disentangle culture from institutions, we employ regional instruments as well as data on the prevalence of the pathogen Toxoplasma Gondii, linguistic differences, and the frequency of blood types. The...

In this essay I use the GLOBE research study by House et al. (2013) as a proxy for measuring cultural distance. Unlike other studies, GLOBE introduces nine cultural dimensions and focuses exclusively on managers, allowing for a distinct glimpse into the values of people actually making trade...