2018 DRI Annual Conference: "Economics and Culture"

Event Overview

There has been increasing interest over the last decade in understanding the role of culture in shaping development outcomes. The push has come from many directions: from studying economic history, from the institutions and growth literature, from political economy, and more recently from a literature that has explicitly tried to measure dimensions of culture and their evolution and their impact on economic interactions and on the process of development. Culture, defined loosely as shared ideas, customs, and social behavior, is from the perspective of economics a deeply endogenous variable, in other words, something that is determined through a history of economic, social, and political interaction. At the same time, once a culture forms, it acquires its own valence, shaping the way individuals interact, transact, and aggregate into a process of growth.

Presentations and Slides

Nathan Nunn (Harvard University) giving a presentation titled “The Importance of Culture and Context for Development Policy” at the 2018 DRI Annual Conference: Economics and Culture. View his slides here.

Enrico Spolaore (Tufts University) giving a presentation titled “Modern Fertility” at the 2018 DRI Annual Conference: Economics and Culture. View his slides here.

William Easterly (New York University) giving a presentation titled “Does Ethnicity Predict Culture?” at the 2018 DRI Annual Conference: Economics and Culture. View his slides here.

Alberto Bisin (New York University) giving a presentation titled “The Joint Dynamics of Culture and Institutions” at the 2018 DRI Annual Conference: Economics and Culture. View his slides here.

Gérard Roland (University of California Berkeley) giving a presentation titled “The Deep Historical Roots of Modern Culture” at the 2018 DRI Annual Conference: Economics and Culture. View his slides here.