Yashi Jain (p)

Balaussa Shaimakhanova (Azubayeva)

Culture Based Development (CBD) individual and regional analysis has demonstrated that places that provide highly for ecological goods are also high on the provision of other public goods. The aim of this paper is to cross check two questions. Firstly, it inquires whether provision for peace (approximated with defense spending, cultural cohesion and welfare effort) and provision for environmental concerns are also having a common trend across space. The rationale for this expectation is that cultural attitudes with high other-regarding preferences motivate the provision of any type of public good, while environment and peace are two types of public good. Second, I would like to check whether the aggregation of the effect makes any difference. We all know that aggregation on different levels shows differences in the sign of the effect for population and economic growth relationship and for altruism of individuals and groups. Hence, the question is whether the coincidence between level of provision of public goods for same underlying cultural attitudes will hold the same way on national (country) level as it was previously found for individual and regional level. Using a composite dataset with indicators obtained from the World Value Survey and the Estes Weighted Index of Social Progress for year 2010 and for 147 countries and 88,681 individual observations, I apply both individual and country level analysis and confirm that cultural filtering drives the other regarding preferences that determine the local provision of both environmental and peace related public goods.

Tahar Mjigal (p), Annie Tubadji, Suresh Govindapuran

Yashi Jain

Adopting certain retirement investment strategy is a financial behaviour that can be thought of as exhibiting certain insurance preference against the fear of being exposed to uncertainty in elderly age. Culture Based Development is a research paradigm that suggests that people’s preferences are shaped by the cultural context (Tubadji 2013, 2023). Meanwhile, the stream of literature on psychological types has shown that a big part of human preferences is based on the psychological type (Borghans et al. 2008; Fritsch and Storey 2017; Fritsch, Obschonka and Wyrwich 2019). Our study aims to identify how the changing cultural context affects the preference for investment in one’s retirement plan, controlling for the psychological type and ethnicity of the individual. To achieve methodologically a clear identification we use data from the Health Retirement Study (HRS) by the University of Michigan, for the years 1992 – 2020. Firstly, we compare the propensity to invest in retirement among people from Hindu background born in the USA and the rest of the USA-born population, controlling for the ethnic heterogeneity and employing a detailed Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis. Thus, we learn how the individuals from Hindu identity differ on cultural basis in their preferences as compared to other ethnicities. We control in the detailed decomposition for the individual psychological type. Secondly, we compare the propensity of the Hindu background born in the USA with the Hindu background arriving as immigrants to the USA. Using both psychological type and economic status controls, we can now study how the higher-risk profile of an immigrant and the changing cultural context of the migrant (swapping India with the USA) seem to associate with the preferences of the individual for investment in their retirement. We use Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to obtain comparable findings with the first part of our analysis. Next, we employ a novel difference in differences and treatment effects procedure to establish clear causal inference for the impact of the changing cultural narrative on the financial behaviour of the individual. The paper offers the main value added of clarifying the link between local culture and individual psychological propensity.

Govindapuram Suresh (p), Annie Tubadji, Tahar MJIGAL

Tahar Mjigal

Caste is a cultural marker that is often a source for discrimination and social tension in India. This
paper aims to document the presence of cultural narratives that create discrimination in the
provision of bank loans in rural India in order to synthesize the cultural economic mechanism behind
perceived discrimination. We focus on the grey financial market of middlemen for bank loans in rural
areas. We study the effect of cultural distance between the middleman and the loan applicant in
terms of the social rank of their caste. We collect primary data from the rural area of Telangana
State in India in the year 2023. We find that higher cultural distance between the middleman and
the loan applicant is associated with a higher cultural discrimination effect. This effect reveals in the
form of the time for waiting for the loan and the size of the loan finally granted. We compare the
caste-based taste for discrimination to the religion and gender-based taste for discrimination in the
same case study and find that the caste-based taste dominates the effect. Finally, we provide insight
into the spread between objectively experienced and perceived discrimination in loan provision. We
examine the impact from awareness of legal rights to report grey market activities on the
discrimination level differences by cultural group. This allows us to shed some light on the degree of
internalisation of culture-based stigma among the poor in India. We use the results from this case
study to propose a general model of cultural filtering of emotions as a basis for the taste for
discrimination in financial decision-making.

Balaussa Shaimakhanova (Azubayeva) (p), Frédéric Boy, Wayne Thomas

Govindapuram Suresh

Cultural memory of places may be a cause of sticky intergenerational mobility for individuals from traditionally culturally discriminated groups. Our hypothesis is that this stickiness is a function of the Bourdieu-type distinction based on local cultural persistence in the perception of parental cultural capital (i.e., parental occupation and linguistic identity). Using a newly discovered historic dataset from Wales (UK) in the period 1900 – 1915 and a plethora of econometric techniques (including multinomial logit, Tobit model, 2ISLS IV and 3SLS), we explore this mechanism on individua level and find that the local persistence in treatment towards social class and Welsh identity causes biases on intergenerational mobility. Therefore, intergenerational mobility is generally associated with earning lower wages. Humble origins generally result in students starting work rather than continuing to higher education. Only affluent parental occupations lead to positive distinction at school but are associated with fewer upwardly mobile heirs.
Moreover, parental Welsh names, as a cultural marker, are associated with students’ negative distinction (physical punishment), which is related to lower wages. Our findings confirm that local cultural perceptions can cause persistent over time discrimination towards individuals from local ethnic groups through hindering their justified by merit socio-economic mobility.

Annie Tubadji, Maryam Alomair (p), Frederic Boy

Annie Tubadji

Research on migration has demonstrated that migrants arrive in the destination country carrying sticky cultural attitudes from the place where they come from, which at times withholds their local performance and other times benefits the local milieu with alternative problem-solving rationales. This study aims to focus its attention to the cultural stickiness of the cultural attitudes in specific with regard to other-regarding preferences and risky behaviour in the recipient country. We use data from the database provided by the Saudi Insurance Company Altawunyia. We approximate the other-regarding preferences with the propensity to drive safely on the road. We use the place of origin of a driver as an approximation of her or his distance from the cultural attitudes to risk in driving among the incumbent population. Put differently, if someone is from a different country, we expect them to have a different average propensity to behave riskily on the road. The database contains information about the country of origin of the insured person as well as data on the degree of precarious driving that the individual has registered according to the telematics of their car. We employ Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis to establish the degree of other-regarding preferences (approximated by the average degree of propensity to take risk during driving) characteristic for each cultural group. Our findings demonstrate that there is cultural distance and cultural stickiness in the degree of other-regarding preferences in driving among people from different countries who hold a car insurance and live in Saudi Arabia.