Culture, Diffusion, and Economic Development: The Problem of Observational Equivalence

Ani Harutyunyan and Ömer Özak

No 1702, Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This research explores the direct and barrier effects of culture on economic development. It shows both theoretically and empirically that whenever the technological frontier is at the top or bottom of the world distribution of a cultural value, there exists an observational equivalence between absolute cultural distances and cultural distances relative to the frontier, preventing the identification of its direct and barrier effects. Since the technological frontier usually has the ``right'' cultural values for development, it tends to be in the extremes of the distribution of cultural traits, generating observational equivalence and confounding the analysis. These results highlight the difficulty of disentangling the direct and barrier effects of culture. The empirical analysis finds suggestive evidence for direct effects of individualism and conformity with hierarchy, and barrier effects of hedonism.

Keywords: Comparative economic development; cultural differences; barriers to technological diffusion; individualism; power distance; vertical hierarchy; hedonism; linguistic distance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 O11 O20 O33 O40 O47 O57 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Culture, diffusion, and economic development: The problem of observational equivalence (2017)
Working Paper: Culture, Diffusion, and Economic Development: The Problem of Observational Equivalence (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:smu:ecowpa:1702

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