|
on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Johannes C. Buggle |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the historical origins of collectivist cultural norms and their longterm economic consequences. In its first part, I test the hypothesis that collectivism emerged historically in pre-industrial agricultural economies in which group effort was crucial for subsistence. I find a positive and significant association between the traditional use of irrigation - a production mode that required extensive collaboration and coordination within groups of farmers - and collectivist norms today. Instrumenting traditional irrigation by the environmental suitability for irrigated agriculture lead to similar results that point at a causal interpretation of the findings. I find that the effects persist in migrants, and investigate factors that hinder the transmission of collectivism. The second part of the paper shows that by affecting culture, past irrigated agriculture continues to influence contemporaneous innovation at the national and individual level. While irrigated agriculture is associated with greater technological progress in pre-modern societies, this relationship is reversed in the long-run. In addition, by favoring attitudes towards obedience, past irrigation also predicts patterns of job specialization and selection into routine-intensive jobs of countries and individuals. |
| Keywords: | Agriculture; Culture, Collectivism, Persistence, Innovation, Job Tasks |
| JEL: | N00 O10 O30 Z10 |
| Date: | 2017–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lau:crdeep:17.06&r=evo |
| By: | Bar-El, Ronen (Open University of Israel); Tobol, Yossi (Jerusalem College of Technology (JTC)) |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of religiosity, gender, and "day of the week", on the level of honesty by conducting under-the-cup experiment among religious and secular, female and male Jewish students. We show that the level of honesty among religious subject, males and females, increases as the day of the experiment is closer to the upcoming Saturday, the Jewish holy day. We also found that the "Saturday effect" does not exist among secular subjects. In addition, we found that the religious females show the highest level of honesty, especially on Thursday. Finally, we derive practical implication from our study. |
| Keywords: | gender effect, holy day effect, honesty, religiosity |
| JEL: | C91 D63 Z12 |
| Date: | 2017–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10609&r=evo |