Culture constrains individual choice, rendering certain actions impermissible or taboo. While cultural constraints may regulate behavior within a group, they can have a pernicious effect in multicultural societies, inhibiting the emergence of unified social conventions. We analyze interactions between members of two cultural groups who are matched to play a coordination game with an arbitrary n...

Firms exhibit heterogeneity in size, productivity, and internal structure, and this is true even within the same industry. Our paper provides evidence of a link between an organization’s culture—specifically the trust environment—and its level of specialization. We show experimentally that exogenously imposed culture endogenously leads to variation in organizational form. We prime trust and dem...

This study offers an extension of Harjoto, Laksmana and Lee (2020) by presenting a descriptive comparison gender differences in writing style, how they impact the choice words readability corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. We examine readability, solidarity, certainty CSR find that female leaders use style conveys greater solidarity with their audience, thereby making better connect...

The Transmission of Democracy: From the Village to the Nation-State We provide evidence that a history of democracy at the local level is associated with contemporary democracy at the national level. Auxiliary estimates show that a tradition of local democracy is also associated with attitudes that favor democracy, with better quality institutions, and higher level of economic development. JEL ...

Symbolic Values, Value Formation and Interpersonal Relations Interpersonal relations are shaped by the judgements associated with the social categories that individuals perceive in their social contacts. I develop a model of how those judgments form based on a theory of symbolic values. The model depicts the interaction between two values, one associated with an inherited ethnic trait (“nationa...

Given a Markovian Brownian martingale Z, we build a process X which is a martingale in its own filtration and satisfies X1 = Z1. We call X a dynamic bridge, because its terminal value Z1 is not known in advance. We compute explicitly its semimartingale decomposition under both its own filtration FX and the filtration FX,Z jointly generated by X and Z. Our construction is heavily based on parabo...

This paper examines the relationship between economic and cultural variables and the decision to attend university. We find that a student is more likely to aspire to attend university if: they have the internet at home; are encouraged by their teachers; or attend a Catholic or independent school rather than a public school. Our analysis also suggests that the level of parent support is importa...

What makes entrepreneurs different? Using a cross-country dataset, this paper explores essential parts of the value system of entrepreneurs in Western European countries by comparing value items of the self-employed to that of the non-self-employed. The selfemployed rate values higher that aim toward openness to change and self-enhancement. In turn, values related to conservation are considered...

A basic tenet of socio-economics is that economic behavior is shaped by social bonds and cultural context. A relevant controversy in evolutionary biology is group selection and the related issue of altruistic behavior, that is, behavior neutral or detrimental to the individual but positive for the survival of the group. In this paper we examine the parallel controversies surrounding “economic m...