Culture and Institutions

By A. Alesina, Paola Giuliano. Social Science Research Network, 2015

1,392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing body of empirical work measuring different types of cultural traits has shown that culture matters for a variety of economic outcomes. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of the relevance of culture: its relationship to institutions. We review work with a theoretical, empirical, and historical bent to assess the presence of a two-way causal effect between culture and institutions.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f5847198dd7c0ce628550cbf92ac983e8bda733

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Citations in the corpus

Regional inequality in Europe: evidence, theory and policy implications (2019, neutral): “Institutions are the rules of the game in a society, and they can be understood in the broad sense as including formal organisations, government and laws, as well as a variety of informal norms, conventions and collective beliefs (North, 1990: 477; Alesina and Guiliano, 2015).”
Culture as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation Over a Century (2013, neutral): “See The Gallup Poll; public opinion, 1935–1971. 5 A curve that rises slowly at first, then rapidly, and then flattens is called an “S-shaped” diffusion shape even if it doesn’t, strictly speaking, look like an S. These curves are common in the technology and epidemiology literature. See Geroski (200”
Cross‐Country Determinants of Early‐Stage Necessity and Opportunity‐Motivated Entrepreneurship: Accounting for Model Uncertainty (2018, positive): “Since institutional, cultural, legal, and geographic variables are unlikely to change significantly over a short period of time (Alesina and Giuliano 2015; Bjørnskov and Foss 2016), we believe that this approach is appropriate.”
Kinship Systems, Cooperation, and the Evolution of Culture (2018, positive): “Recent work on (nuclear) family ties (Bertrand and Schoar, 2006; Alesina and Giuliano, 2013) is likewise concerned with social structures, but differs greatly in terms of substantive focus and measurement.”
States and economic growth: Capacity and constraints☆ (2017, background): “Third, there is a complementarity between cultural values and institutional change which offers the potential to provide a powerful explanation of why attempts to reform institutions sometimes succeed and sometimes fail (Greif, 1994; Tabellini, 2008; Alesina and Giuliano, 2015).”
Politico-Economic Regimes and Attitudes: Female Workers under State Socialism (2019, background): “The first related body of work, surveyed in Alesina and Giuliano (2015), analyzes the effects of large institutional changes on attitudes.”
Long Live Keju! The Persistent Effects of China’s Civil Examination System (2020, methodology): “Reported in columns (5) and (6), the results show that jinshi density in a student’s hometown has a significantly positive effect also on cognitive performance in terms of his/her class”
Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building (2019, positive): “…social and cultural development in formerly frontier areas were quite sizable in the long-run.44 This potential for persistence is consistent with a growing body of economic research on culture and institutions (see Alesina and Giuliano, 2015) and should be further explored in future work.”
Culture: persistence and evolution (2014, positive): “Immigrants provide a particularly useful laboratory for the study of the evolution of values and beliefs because, as mentioned above, their cultural attitudes are likely to bear the mark of the country from which they, their parents or their grandparents emigrated.(5) However, they are also influenc”