If we define institutions as the rules of the game (North 1990), it can be hard to separate the cause and effect between individual beliefs and cultural context. I utilise “Cultural Theory” (Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky 1990) which creates a typology of needs and resources, and four logical strategies that derive from an individual’s expectation about their ability to manage their situation. W...

Trust beliefs are heterogeneous across individuals and, at the same time, persistent across generations. We investigate one mechanism yielding these dual patterns: false consensus. In the context of a trust game experiment, we show that individuals extrapolate from their own type when forming trust beliefs about the same pool of potential partners i.e., more (less) trustworthy individuals form ...

abstract this paper proposes an approach to find an optimum structure for educational levels of human forces. to this end, a linear programming (lp) model integrated with a social accounting matrix (sam) was employed. the integrated model was employed using the sam of golestan province of iran. it was demonstrated that when unemployment is the result of inconsistency between supply and demand f...

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of several factors on a ‘conventionality index’ in the specific context of the cinema exhibition sector. To our knowledge, it is the first time that a standard conventionality index has been constructed for this purpose. Econometric analysis of the determinants of variation in this index provides decision-makers with an empirical focus for analyzing di...

In club models of religion, sacrifices demanded by religious groups promote efficient production of club goods by screening out free riders. An alternative, complementary view is that religious clubs provide a means of sorting, matching individuals with similar characteristics. Sorting differs from screening in that it operates on traits that do not directly affect club goods production. This p...

We investigate the effect of broad personality traits—the Big Five—on an individual’s decision to become self-employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of selfemployment varies considerably across professions, we also perform the analysis for different types of professions, namely, those classified as being in the “cre...

Drawing on data from an annual French guidebook published in 2004, this paper focuses on the determinants of experts’ ratings on Cuban cigars. We find that high quality cigars are more likely to be recommended to more experienced cigar lovers. Both the selfassessed quality and recommendation depend on the length and diameter of the cigars, but also on more subjective characteristics like number...

Drawing on representative household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine the role of an early precursor of entrepreneurial development – parental role models – for the individual decision to become self-employed in the post-unified Germany. The findings suggest that the socialist regime significantly damaged this mechanism of an intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurial...

The Economic Payoff of Name Americanization We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names experienced larger occupational upgrading. Some, such as those wh...

From Farmers to Merchants: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish Economic History Since the Middle Ages the Jews have been engaged primarily in urban, skilled occupations, such as crafts, trade, finance, and medicine. This distinctive occupational selection occurred between the seventh and the ninth centuries in the Muslim Empire and then it spread to other locations. We argue that this tran...