TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bisin, Alberto
AU  - Verdier, Thierry
TI  - The Economics of Cultural Transmission and Socialization
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16512
PY  - 2010
Y2  - November 2010
DO  - 10.3386/w16512
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16512
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16512.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alberto Bisin
Department of Economics
New York University
19 West 4th Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 212/998-8916
Fax: 212/995-4186
E-Mail: alberto.bisin@nyu.edu

Thierry Verdier
PSE
and Ecole des Ponts-Paris Tech
and PUC-Rio
48 Boulevard Jourdan
75014 Paris, France
E-Mail: verdier@pse.ens.fr
AB  - Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes in the job market). It is, however, the pervasive evidence of the resilience of ethnic and religious traits across generations that motivates a large fraction of the theoretical and empirical literature on cultural transmission. This article reviews the main contributions of models of cultural transmission, from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It presents their implications regarding the long-run population dynamics of cultural traits and cultural heterogeneity, the world's geographical fragmentation by ethic and religious traits, at any given time. Finally, the paper reviews the empirical literature which estimates various properties of cultural transmission mechanisms as well as the population dynamics of specific traits.
ER  -