Culture, Institutions & the Long Divergence

Abstract

Thanks to participants at the 2019 CEPR Workshop on the Economics of Religion and the 2019 ASREC Conference. All errors are our own The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Individualism, Human Capital Formation, and Labor Market Success

“…The main empirical challenge when evaluating the economic effects of culture is to disentangle the effects of culture from those of the institutional and economic environment, as both are clearly intertwined (Alesina and Giuliano 2015;Bisin et al 2021). In particular, there is evidence that individualism is linked to a country's innovative capacity and growth prospects (Gorodnichenko and Roland 2011a, 2011b, 2017.…”

“…To address the interdependence of culture and institutions, the literature frequently uses the epidemiological approach. This method relies on the comparison of outcomes of migrants from different cultural backgrounds in the same destination country, where they are exposed to the same economic and institutional environment (Fernández and Fogli 2009;Fernández 2011;Alesina and Giuliano 2015;Bisin et al 2021). The approach assigns migrants the average cultural value of their origin country, which is based on the argument that cultural traits are persistent and that migrants take their original cultural toolkit with them when they move to a different country.…”

Does cultural resource endowment backfire? Evidence from China’s cultural resource curse

“…Different pathways of influence, heterogeneity of cultural resources, different market environments, and changing industrial factor conditions may result in differentiated development outcomes in the certain cultural industries. In classical economic growth theory and modern economic growth theory, cultural capital can indirectly act on economic development by constraining technological choice and institutional choice ( David, 1975 ; Chang, 2011 ; Bisin et al, 2021 ; Qi et al, 2021 ). Meanwhile, more attentions are paid to the links between creative economy and local development, inequalities of opportunity and businesses of spiritual cultural capital have different influences on economic development from the perspective of cultural capital heterogeneity ( Tubadji, 2014 ; Ballet et al, 2015 ), development of a creative economy can form an integral part of any attempt to redress inequality, provided that the process also brings about broader structural changes to ensure that creative workers are themselves not disadvantaged in relation to other workers ( Boccella and Salerno, 2016 ), yet, the economy and the cultural industries of western China are still underdeveloped, the explanations for this are mainly due to the small scale of the enterprise, insufficient conditions to create demand, shortages of talent, and lack of investment capital for the cultural industries development ( Fan and Xue, 2018 ; Fan and Zhang, 2019 ).…”