"Beyond the Melting Pot": Cultural Transmission, Marriage, and the Evolution of Ethnic and Religious Traits*

Bisin, Alberto; Verdier, Thierry

doi:10.1162/003355300554953

Cited by 884 publications

(676 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…This allows us to concentrate our analysis on the cultural evolution of the minority group. With respect to that group, we will follow recent work the economic literature on cultural transmission (Boyd and Richerson (1985), Cavalli Sforza (1981), Bisin and Verdier (2000), (2001), (2004), Saez-Marti and Zenou (2005)) and assume that work values are culturally transmitted within the community according to an intergenerational transmission process. Consider then that the community population is stationary, with one child per parent.…”

Section: Employment and Cultural Evolution Of Work Valuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segregation, entrepreneurship and work values: the case of France

Senik

Verdier

2010

J Popul Econ

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

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Section: Employment and Cultural Evolution Of Work Valuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Segregation, entrepreneurship and work values: the case of France

Senik

Verdier

2010

J Popul Econ

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“…A nation's religious environment plays an important role in the beliefs of its citizens, and their likelihood to become more or less religious apart from individual family environments (Bisin and Verdier 2000;Flor and Knapp 2001;Kelley and Graaf 1997;Sherkat and Wilson 1995). If countries with more secular populations have fewer children then-regardless of the reasons why the relationship exists-children will be less likely to be exposed to secular ideas, which would limit horizontal transmission of secular culture and exogenous secularization of the global population.…”

Section: Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Secularism and Fertility Worldwide

Schnabel¹

2016

Preprint

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This study hypothesizes a link between societal secularism and fertility. Using country-level data from multiple sources (N=181) and multilevel data from 55 countries in the World Values Survey (N=78,639), I document a strong negative relationship between societal secularism and both country-level fertility rates and individual-level fertility behavior. Secularism, even in small amounts, is associated with population stagnation or even decline, whereas highly religious countries have higher fertility rates that promote population growth. This country-level pattern is driven by more than aggregate lower fertility of individual nonreligious people. In fact, secularism is more closely linked to religious than nonreligious people's fertility behavior and appears to be a function of different cultural values related to gender and reproduction in more secular societies. Beyond its importance for the religious composition of the world population, the societal-level association between secularism and fertility is relevant to key fertility theories and may help account, in part, for below-replacement fertility. Rather than religious people becoming a smaller proportion of the world population, demographers have projected that because the nonreligious have fewer children they will make up a smaller proportion of the world population over time (Hackett et al. 2015;Kaufmann 2010;Skirbekk, Kaufmann, and Goujon 2010;Stonawski et al. 2015). This literature improves on secularization theory by highlighting how individual-level secularity limits fertility behavior and thus constrains secularization, but has thus far neglected potential impacts of societal-level secularity despite secularism being more than just an individual attribute. Culture is transmitted, and religious beliefs and preferences acquired, both vertically (i.e., within families) and 1 "Religious" and "nonreligious" can be defined in many ways. Past research has often conceptualized secularism as the inverse of absence of religion, and work on religion and fertility in particularly has frequently focused on binary measures that categorize people as religious or not. In order to consider varieties of secularism, I examine multiple religion/non-religion measures, some of which are binary and some gradational, and aggregations of these items.Secularism and Fertility Worldwide 2 horizontally (i.e., peer-to-peer within the wider culture) Verdier 2000, 2011).Research on religion and fertility has highlighted how the lower fertility of secular individuals limits vertical transmission of secularism, has thus far largely neglected potential demographic limits to horizontal transmission of secularism. The key unanswered question is whether a country-level relationship exists between secularism and fertility net of individual-level religion, which would further constrain secularization-due to fewer children being socialized in more secular contexts-and could contribute to below-replacement fertility.To examine the country-level relationship between secularism and f...

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“…Under the first Affirmative Action policy, the advantage of being "good" is smaller and, as a result, parents put less effort in transmitting the good work habit trait. This leads to a lower equilibrium value and could possibly lead to the disappearance 14 The main difference between these two Affirmative Action policies is that, in the first one, employers are obliged to hire φ% of their workers from the minority group but cannot test them. So whether the worker is "good" or "bad" is irrelevant in the employment process and "good" and "bad" workers have the same chance of being hired.…”

Section: Affirmative Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We assume, unlike most of the literature on cultural transmission (see Bisin and Verdier (2000) and Saez and Sjögren (2008)), that (i) all parents, irrespective of their type, agree that one of the traits (good habits) is superior 8 and (ii) the cultural transmission is biased. In particular, the probability of adopting a trait when learning from society is a non-linear function of popularity, so that more popular traits are copied with a probability higher than their population share.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural transmission and discrimination

Saez-Marti

Zénou

2012

Journal of Urban Economics

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Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process, which depends on parents' investment in the trait and the social environment where children live. We show that if a sufficiently high proportion of employers have taste-based prejudices against minority workers, their prejudices are always selffulfilled in steady state and minority workers end up having, on average, worse work habits than majority workers. This leads to a ghetto culture. Affirmative Action can improve the welfare of minorities whereas integration can be beneficial to minority workers but detrimental to workers from the majority group.J.E.L. Classification: J15, J71.

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"Beyond the Melting Pot": Cultural Transmission, Marriage, and the Evolution of Ethnic and Religious Traits*

Cited by 884 publications

References 21 publications

Segregation, entrepreneurship and work values: the case of France

Segregation, entrepreneurship and work values: the case of France

Secularism and Fertility Worldwide

Cultural transmission and discrimination

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