This chapter introduces and critically discusses the idea of measuring the culture of countries and cross-national differences therein. We start by elaborating the theoretical foundations for studying culture at the country level. We highlight the use of countries or nations as a unit of...

Is Islam compatible with democracy? While recent developments in Northern Africa and the Middle East have added new urgency to this question, the literature seems stuck with an apparent paradox of Muslims expressing a strong desire for democracy, but democratic institutions not actually taking...

Purpose - The purpose of this chapter is to make sense of the cultural distance paradox through a basic assessment of the cross-cultural comparability of cultural distance measures. Cultural distance between a base country and partner countries is a key construct in international business (IB)....

Quantitative culture research is dominated by Hofstede’s framework, which is based on survey data collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As countries develop economically, modernization theory predicts shifting societal values, which likely affect country’s scores on Hofstede’s...

Following Max Weber’s seminal work, much recent work has turned to religious values to explain socio-economic developments. We present a test of Weber’s original thesis that addresses fundamental limitations of previous research. A novel method that builds on happiness research is used to...

Although racial inequalities are much researched, studies differ on the specific measure of individuals’ racial identity that they consider. This can affect the comparability of results across studies and, more importantly, the estimation of racial inequality in society. We estimate the extent...

I propose and test a bottom-up channel through which trust between parties to anexchange can go on to affect comparative economic development of societies as awhole. My approach revolves around the autonomy that employers (principals)grant to workers (agents), which is a key feature of workplace...

Economists are increasingly using primes that make group identity salient to overcome the inferential limitations of behavioral quasi-experiments involving pre-existing groups (e.g., males vs. females). However, while priming group identity provides powerful means for identifying a causal effect...

Although the importance of technological change for increasing prosperity is undisputed and economists typically deem it unlikely that labor-saving technology causes long-term employment losses, people's anxiety about automation and its distributive consequences can be an important shaper of...