Two decades after reunification substantial economic disparities between East and West Germany remain. With formal institutions being equalized, a typical explanation is that the partition of Germany created differences in economic values and attitudes that continue to feed differences in...

This note provides an explanation for the presumably counterintuitive, negative correlations between values and practices reported by the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness project. We argue that such results are compatible with basic microeconomic insights concerning...

In a recent paper in this journal, Maseland and van Hoorn argued that values surveys tend to conflate values and marginal preferences. This assertion has been challenged by Brewer and Venaik, who claim that the wording of most survey items does not suggest that these elicit marginal preferences....

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...

We study the cultural foundations of management practices, which are increasingly recognized as important determinants of firm performance. This research closes the loop on two developing literatures, one seeking cultural explanations for economic development and the other seeking to account for...

The aim of this symposium is to move beyond the established, narrow measures of well-being. It does so by bringing together insights from the happiness approach and the capability approach, both of which are at the forefront of theorizing on welfare in economics. The reason is that the...

This paper examines the welfare-impact of trade from the premise that resources are limited and all goods in the long run consist of recyclable resources. It argues that export (import) of finished goods implies export (import) of the resources of which these goods exist. Trade affects the...

Research on how multinational firms deal with home–host cultural differences argues that cultural differences are minimized and assumes that foreign cultures are homogenous. In this paper we relax the cultural homogeneity assumption. In the presence of cultural variation in host countries the...

Do cultural attitudes affect institutions and economic performance? This paper suggests they do. To measure the impact of cultural attitudes we use prevalence rates of the common parasite Toxoplasma gondii which is known to affect individual attitudes and societal values in predictable ways. By...

M<sc>aseland</sc> R. Does Germany have an East-West problem? Regional growth patterns in Germany since reunification, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. This paper challenges the proposition that Germany suffers from an economic East-West gap. Since core-periphery patterns are common anywhere, peripheral East Germany...