CAREER: Culture, Context, and Development Policy: An Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This CAREER proposal uses four projects to study how transmitted values and beliefs affect key economic outcomes. These include how people cooperate, how property rights affect investment decisions, and how families work together to succeed. The theme of this CAREER project is that insights from other social sciences and local context can help explain international and regional differences in economic outcomes. The first project studies how to improve accountability and performance of local leaders; the second studies how a mismatch between traditional social institutions and legal property rights affect investment, while the third project studies how social structures affect insurance and cooperation. The final project will digitize data for use of a wide community of researchers who want to incorporate ethnographic data into quantitative analyses. The research consists of four projects to study how local context interacts with legal and government institutions to explain differences in economic outcomes around the globe. The projects combine a variety of methods: randomized controlled trials, lab-in-the-field experiments, original surveys, and digitization of archival and ethnographic data. The first project uses a randomized control trial (RCT) to investigate whether social structures that increase accountability of local leaders can be leveraged to improve the provision of public goods. The second project provides new evidence on the ecological origins of private, relative to communal, land rights and explores how traditional property rights structures affect efforts to title land. The third project studies how extended families cooperate to provide informal insurance to family members. This project expands the traditional focus within economics on the nuclear family to extended kinship. The fourth project is an innovative data digitization effort to provide access to new ethnographic data for several different countries. The results of these projects will provide insight into how local context affects the efficacy of the global economy, and how greater understanding of local context can improve initiatives to spur economic growth. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.