American geography of opportunity reveals European origins

Berger, Thor; Engzell, Per

doi:10.1073/pnas.1810893116

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This finding contradicts longstanding predictions that cultural differences between areas would fade under the influence of technological change and internal migration (e.g., McKinney and Bourque 1971). Indeed, in light of recent studies demonstrating the persistence of cultural differences between areas (e.g., Berger and Engzell 2019;Sequeira, Nunn, and Qian 2020), it remains questionable whether religious convergence is to be expected any time soon.…”

Section: Moderate Identificationcontrasting

confidence: 60%

The Rise of the Nones across the United States, 1973 to 2018: State-Level Trends of Religious Affiliation and Participation in the General Social Survey

Wiertz¹,

Lim²

2021

SocScience

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Although there has been a fast rise in the share of Americans reporting no religion, it is unclear whether this trend has affected different parts of the country equally. Against this backdrop, we apply dynamic multilevel regression and poststratification (Dynamic MRP) to General Social Survey data over the period 1973 to 2018 to estimate state-level religious trends. We validate our estimates against external benchmarks, finding that they perform well in terms of predictive accuracy. Substantively, we find steeper increases in the share of religious nones in states that had more nones to begin with. Moreover, whereas state-level increases in the share of religious nones are strongly linked to declines in occasional church attendance and moderate religious identification, the associations with trends in regular attendance and strong identification are much weaker. States have thus not only diverged in their share of religious nones but also experienced different degrees of religious polarization.

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Section: Moderate Identificationcontrasting

confidence: 60%

The Rise of the Nones across the United States, 1973 to 2018: State-Level Trends of Religious Affiliation and Participation in the General Social Survey

Wiertz¹,

Lim²

2021

SocScience

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“…First, we characterize the variation in absolute and relative mobility across 282 municipalities. Mobility differences within Sweden span those observed between the least mobile (Norway) and most mobile (Argentina) economies in our sample, much like mobility varies locally in countries with less extensive social welfare institutions today Güell et al, 2018;Alesina et al, 2019;Berger & Engzell, 2019;Asher et al, 2020). Next, we examine the local correlates of these regional mobility differences.…”

supporting

confidence: 65%

Social Mobility in Sweden Before the Welfare State

Berger¹,

Engzell²,

Eriksson³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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We use historical census data to show that Sweden exhibited high levels of intergenerational occupational mobility several decades before the rise of the welfare state. Mobility rates were higher than in other 19th- and 20th-century European countries, closer to those observed in the highly mobile 19th-century United States. We leverage mobility variation across Swedish municipalities to shed light on potential determinants: economic growth and migration are positively correlated with mobility, consistent with the patterns observed across countries.

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“…Following Berger and Engzell (2019) , we rely on micro data on ancestors’ country of origin from the American Community Survey 2014–2018, and map the county-level information to cities using the crosswalk from Autor and Dorn (2013) . 22 We then compute the shares of peoples ancestors’ country of origin (for which Hofstede’s individualism measure is provided) for each city.…”

Section: Individualism and Policy Compliance In The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture and contagion: Individualism and compliance with COVID-19 policy

Chen

Frey

Presidente

2021

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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In the first wave of the pandemic, places where geographic mobility declined more rapidly saw fewer cases of COVID-19. And yet, there is significant variation in people’s compliance with the lockdown measures introduced by governments in order to curb the spread of the virus. In this paper, we show that much of this variation can be explained by different cultural traits. Specifically, we advance the hypothesis that individualism, which puts greater value on personal freedom, makes government intervention harder, whereas collectivism, which emphasises the wellbeing of the group, makes collective action easier. We find support for these ideas across 111 countries, but also when exploiting within country variation in the two largest economies in the world: China and the United States. Across a host of specifications, people were less abiding by the lockdown rules in places with greater prevalence of individualistic cultural traits. We conclude that cultural factors play a critical role in successful policy implementation.

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American geography of opportunity reveals European origins

Cited by 16 publications

References 24 publications

The Rise of the Nones across the United States, 1973 to 2018: State-Level Trends of Religious Affiliation and Participation in the General Social Survey

The Rise of the Nones across the United States, 1973 to 2018: State-Level Trends of Religious Affiliation and Participation in the General Social Survey

Social Mobility in Sweden Before the Welfare State

Culture and contagion: Individualism and compliance with COVID-19 policy

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