Abstract: Culture’s long-term consequences have been at the focus of many disciplines, yet data on values held dear in the past have been virtually nonexistent. This has made claims on both cultural persistency and its long-term effects impossible to test empirically. In this research project, we argue that folktales are an excellent archive of historically prevalent values and norms. They have been transmitted virtually unchanged over many generations and were frequently used in educating children. Based on this notion, we argue that they are an excellent source for historically prevalent values and norms and we have created a global dataset comprising some 27,000 folktales and covering folktale traditions from 172 countries. In the first part of our talk, Nadia will present our research method describing how we elicit information on moral foundations from our corpus. Moral foundations have been an important topic in social psychology over the last dozen years. To demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, she will present an empirical application, in which we test whether moral messages elicited from folklore associate with long-term socio-economic outcomes – specifically, the incidence of civil conflict. In the second part of our talk, Stefan will rely on an Indian folktale corpus consisting of some 4,100 folktales. This corpus was collected focusing on the many regional traditions of India. In his part of the talk, Stefan will ask whether values and norms deemed to be conducive to both economic and political development have had the theorized effect. The focus will be on income differences across Indian states.
Speakers Bio-sketch:
Prof. Dr. Stefan Voigt is a professor at the University of Hamburg and Director of its Institute of Law and Economics. He is a fellow of CESifo in Munich and has been a visiting professor at universities in Copenhagen, Haifa, Paris (Sorbonne), Rennes, St. Gallen, and Trento. His research focuses on the economic effects of constitutions. More recently, he has studied the determinants and effects of informal institutions and their interactions with formal institutions. He is an editor of Constitutional Political Economy and serves on several editorial boards, including those of Public Choice and the International Review of Law & Economics. He has also worked as a consultant for the public and private sectors.
Dr. Nadia von Jacobi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Trento, Italy, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship. An institutional economist, she studies how institutions, cultural values, and socioeconomic structures interact to shape development. Her work combines institutional and development economics with quantitative methods for studying complex systems. In particular, she develops and applies correlation network approaches to map interdependencies among institutional and structural factors, identify asymmetric relationships, and examine how broader systems are organised. Her research brings institutional theory and empirical analysis together to understand institutions as interconnected elements of evolving social and economic systems. She is currently a local principal investigator on a European Horizon project examining how social networks affect, and are affected by, the rule of law (net-rol.eu).