DOES CULTURE AFFECT ECONOMIC OUTCOMES 文化会影响经济成果.pdfVIP

JANUARY 2006 DOES CULTURE AFFECT ECONOMIC OUTCOMES? Luigi Guiso University of Rome Tor Vergata CEPR Paola Sapienza Northwestern University NBER CEPR * Luigi Zingales Harvard University, NBER, CEPR PAPER PREPARED FOR THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES *Luigi Guiso thanks MURST and the EEC, Paola Sapienza the Center for International Economics and Development at Northwestern University, and Luigi Zingales the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago for financial support. David Lucca and Piotr Kuszewski provided research assistantship. We greatly benefited from the comments of Alberto Alesina, George Akerlof, Gary Becker, Alberto Bisin, Patrick Bolton, Mike Fishman, Mat Gentzkow, Peter Gourevitch, Jim Hines, Patricia Ledesma, Adair Morse, William Ocasio, Francisco Perez-Gonzales, Bruce Sacerdote, Andrei Shleifer, Jeremy Stein, Tim Taylor, Michael Waldman, and participants to seminars at the University of Chicago Micro Seminar and Princeton University. Until recently, economists have been reluctant to rely on culture as a possible determinant of economic phenomena. Much of this reluctance stems from the very notion of culture: it is so broad and the channels through which it can enter the economic discourse so ubiquitous (and vague) that it is difficult to design testable (i.e., refutable) hypotheses. Without testable hypotheses, however, there is no role for culture in economics except perhaps as a