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on Evolutionary Economics |
| By: | Oded Galor; Marc Kemp; Daniel C. Wainstock |
| Abstract: | Evidence suggests that the prehistoric out-of-Africa Migration has impacted the degree of intra-population genetic and phenotypic diversity across the globe. This paper provides the first evidence that this migration has shaped cultural diversity. Leveraging a folklore catalogue of 958 oral traditions across the world, we find that ethnic groups further away from East Africa along the migratory routes have lower folkloric diversity. This pattern is consistent with the compression of genetic, phenotypic, and phonemic traits along the out-of-Africa migration routes, setting conditions for the emergence and proliferation of differential cultural diversity and economic development across the world. |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bro:econwp:2023-002&r=evo |
| By: | Thomas Baudin (IESEG School of Management, Univ. Lille, CNRS UMR 9221 - LEM - Lille Economie Management, F-59000 Lille, France and IRES, UCLouvain, Belgium); David de la Croix (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain, Belgium and CEPR, Paris) |
| Abstract: | Reflect on the escape from a stagnant or Malthusian system. If this transformation is propelled by human capital, it should be spearheaded by individuals possessing elevated humancapital. To explore this hypothesis, we investigate the connection between family size and human capital among academics in Northern Europe in the two centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution. We gauge scholars’ human capital using a novel approach based on their publications. We find that scholars with a high number of publications shifted from having more siblings to having fewer than others during the first half of the 18th century. This shift is consistent with an evolutionary growth model in which the initial Malthusian constraint leads the high human capital families to reproduce more, before being endogenously substituted by a Beckerian constraint with a child quality-quantity tradeoff. Our results support an extension of the Galor and Moav (2002)’s approach, in which the decline of Malthusian constraints is linked to human capital accumulation during the 18th century. |
| Keywords: | Universities, Academies, Fertility, Scholars, Human Capital |
| JEL: | N3 J1 O4 |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ies:wpaper:e202408&r=evo |
| By: | Cui, Chi; Dai, Ming; Schwieren, Christiane |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we experimentally investigate how sending a signal of following social norms impacts people’s cooperative behavior in a repeated public goods game, where we disentangle the effect of strategy and internalization of social norms on cooperation. We find that under the signaling mechanism, less cooperative players disguise themselves in the rule-following game, but this does not decrease cooperation overall. More importantly, the signaling mechanism has a heterogeneous effect on cooperation in rule-following and rule-breaking groups: It increases cooperation in rule-following groups but decreases cooperation in rule-breaking groups. Finally, the signaling mechanism tends to offset the decline of contributions among participants in rule-breaking groups rather than rule-following groups. Overall, this paper provides a feasible way to improve social cooperation and enriches the literature on cooperation in the public goods game. |
| Keywords: | public goods game; cooperation; signaling; internalization of social norms |
| Date: | 2024–04–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:awi:wpaper:0746&r=evo |
| By: | Luca Anderlini; Larry Samuelson; Daniele Terlizzese |
| Abstract: | We examine an economy in which interactions are more productive if agents can trust others to refrain from cheating. Some agents are scoundrels, who always cheat, while others cheat only if the cost of cheating, a decreasing function of the proportion of cheaters, is sufficiently low. The economy exhibits multiple equilibria. As the proportion of scoundrels in the economy declines, the high-trust equilibrium can be disrupted by arbitrarily small perturbations or infusions of low-trust agents, while the low-trust equilibrium becomes impervious to perturbations and infusions of high-trust agents. The resilience of trust may thus hinge upon the prevalence of scoundrels. |
| Date: | 2024–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2403.12917&r=evo |
| By: | Benjamin Enke |
| Abstract: | This article calls for a greater integration of moral psychology and political economy. While these disciplines were initially deeply intertwined, cross-disciplinary exchange became rare throughout the 20th century. More recently, the tide has shifted again – social scientists of different backgrounds recognized that morality and politico-economic outcomes influence each other in rich bi-directional ways. Because psychologists and economists possess distinct and complementary skill sets, part of this movement consists of productive ‘economic imperialism’ – economists leveraging their empirical toolkit to test and substantiate theories from moral psychology at scale or in the wild. To illustrate this, I present two case studies of recent economics research on prominent ideas in moral psychology. First, the theory that morality is ultimately economically functional – that it evolved as a form of ‘psychological and biological police’ to enforce cooperation in economic production and exchange. Second, that the structure of morality shapes political views and polarization, including on economic issues such as taxation and redistribution. I conclude from these case studies that economists have much to gain from integrating more ideas from moral psychology, and that moral psychologists will be able to make an even more compelling case that morality and politico-economic outcomes influence each other if they engage with research in economics. |
| JEL: | D01 D70 |
| Date: | 2024–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32279&r=evo |