Culture and Agriculture

Wikimedia Commons

From an paper via MR: 

This study shows that China’s wheat and rice regions have different cultures. China’s rice regions have several markers of East Asian culture: more holistic thought, more interdependent self-construals, and lower divorce rates. The wheat-growing north looked more culturally similar to the West, with more analytic thought, individualism, and divorce. Furthermore, Table 4 presents an instrumental variable regression instrumental variable regression showing that climatic suitability for rice significantly predicts all of the cultural variables in this study, which suggests that reverse causality is unlikely.

Unresolved questions: 

There are still unresolved questions with the rice theory. For example, studies can test whether irrigation is central to the effect of rice by comparing paddy rice with dryland rice cultures, which grow rice without irrigation. Studies can also explore how rice differences persist in the modern world, whether through values, institutions, or other mechanisms.

An obvious follow up can be to explore violence (homicies) within those cultures.  

Culture and Management Practices

. . . [h]igh-individualism societies tend to view the evaluating of subordinates as a way to increase productivity, whilst low-individualism societies find it disrupts harmony (Hofstede, 2001, p. 244-245; Lee et al., 2000). (p. 9).

That is from this interesting paper that relates culture with managerial practices. The title is "Individualism and the cultural roots of management practices" by André van Hoorn. 

Dow Jones and Consumer Culture

From an article by Vauhini Vara & Vijith Assar in The New Yorker

The graph shows the timing in which companies have been added to or dropped from the Dow Jones from 1896 to 2013. The DJ tells something about consumer culture in the U.S, and many parts of the world over the years. They say

. . . the news on Tuesday that the Dow will let go of Hewlett-Packard, along with Alcoa and Bank of America, is a reminder of the fickle nature of consumer culture: even the technology companies that we fetishized not long ago have fallen from our good graces, and from those of the Dow. It’s not hard to imagine someday in the future when Facebook and Twitter end up on the Dow. If that happens, and if history is any guide, they, too, won’t last forever. 

But note the permanence of GE.
The current list of companies in the DJ is here.

Cultural norms, cooperation, and communication: Taking experiments to the field in indigenous communities

Form a paper by Rucha Ghate, Suresh Ghate, & Elinor Ostrom.

Extensive experimental research has been devoted to the study of behaviour in laboratory settings related to public goods, common-pool resources, and other social dilemmas. When subjects are anonymous and not allowed to communicate, they tend not to cooperate. To the surprise of game theorists, however, simply allowing subjects to communicate in a laboratory setting enables them to achieve far more cooperative outcomes. This finding has now been replicated in many laboratory experiments in multiple countries and in some initial field experiments. Carefully conducted laboratory experiments do have strong internal validity. External validity, however, requires further research beyond the initial field experiments that have already been conducted. In this paper, we report on a series of common-pool resource field experiments conducted in eight indigenous communities in India that have very long traditions of shared norms and mutual trust. Two experimental designs were used in all eight villages: a “no-communication” game that was repeated in ten rounds where no one was allowed verbal or written communication and a “communication game” in which the same five participants were allowed to communicate with each other at the beginning of each round before making their decisions. The findings from these field experiments are substantially different from the findings of similar experiments conducted in experimental laboratories. Subjects tended to cooperate in the first design even in the absence of communication. The shared norms in these indigenous communities are so deeply embedded that communication is not needed to adopt cooperative decisions. Communication does, however, tend to homogenize group and individual outcomes so that communities that are overly cooperative tend to reduce cooperation slightly and those with small deviations in the other direction tend to move toward the optimal solution.

Culture and institutions

The right perspective when it comes to culture is then the same as the one for ideology: to develop an approach in which cultural factors interact with institutional and political ones.

The context of the quote is important, it is from a post by Acemoglu and Robinson.  

I used to think that culture and institutions are the same thing [others think that institutions and policies are the same thing]. But if they are not, there are repeated instances in which it is difficult to find the border between cultural practices and informal institutions. There are instances in which institutions transform themselves into cultural practices, and vice-versa. 

Consumption and social identity

In a new published paper Khamis, Prakash, and Siddique write (JEBO, July 2012, see an earlier draft here): 

We examine spending on consumption items which have signaling value in social interactions across groups with distinctive social identities in India, where social identities are defined by caste and religious affiliations. Using nationally representative micro data on household consumption expenditures, we find that disadvantaged caste groups such as Other Backward Castes spend eight percent more on visible consumption than Brahmin and High Caste groups while social groups such as Muslims spend fourteen percent less, after controlling for differences in permanent income, household assets and household demographic composition. The differences across social groups are significant and robust and these differences persist within different sub populations. We find that the higher spending of OBC households on visible consumption is diverted from education spending, while Muslim households divert spending from visible consumption and education towards greater food spending. Additionally, we find that these consumption patterns can be partly explained as a result of the status signaling nature of the consumption items. We also discuss alternative sources of differences in consumption patterns across groups which stem from religious observance.

I might be bias, but I have seen many recent economic papers focused on cultural issued. See for example Raquel Fernandez's recent work (yes, I am bias).  

Culture

A number of empirical studies confirm that culture is an important mechanism that helps explain why historical shocks can have persistent impacts; these are reviewed here. As an example, I discuss the colonial origins hypothesis (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, 2001), and show that our understanding of the transplantation of European legal and political institutions during the colonial period remains incomplete unless the values and beliefs brought by European settlers are taken into account. It is these cultural beliefs that formed the foundation of the initial institutions that in turn were key for long-term economic development.

That is from the very interesting paper "Culture and the historical process" by Nathan Nunn. 

The author argues that there are historical shocks that shape culture, those episodes affect the way societies make choices. His examples are fascinating!

The author claims:

. . . [i]ndividuals from different cultural backgrounds make systematically different choices even when faced with the same decision in the same environment. 

HT: Matthew Baker

Does fortune favor dragons?

Why do seemingly irrational superstitions persist? We analyze the widely held belief among Asians that children born in the Year of the dragon are superior. We use pooled cross section data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to show that Asian immigrants to the United States born in the 1976 year of the dragon are more educated than comparable immigrants from non-dragon years. In contrast, no such educational effect is noticeable for dragon- year children in the general U.S. population. We also provide evidence that Asian mothers of dragon year babies are more educated, richer, and slightly older than Asian mothers of non-dragon year children. This suggests that belief in the greater superiority of dragon-year children is self-fulfilling since the demographic characteristics associated with parents who are more willing and able to adjust their birthing strategies to have dragon children are also correlated with greater investment in their human capital.

Economists studying the seemingly irrational. That is from this paper by Johnson and Nye.