This seminar is CANCELLED

Gaia Spolverini

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Cooperation and prosocial behavior: evidence from the american frontier

Abstract: What are the origins of prosocial behavior? Can it coexist with individualistic cultural traits? In this paper, I investigate this question in the US case, following Alexis de Tocqueville (1830)’s doctrine of “self-interest, rightly understood”, which postulates that the rise of associations in America acts as a check on rising individualism. I build on the idea that when facing both extremely volatile weather conditions and a lack of state capacity, individuals are more prone to cooperate and incentives for self-reliance are weaker. I focus on the historical setting of the American frontier expansion and construct an interaction term using the Total Frontier Experience (TFE) measure from Bazzi et al. (2020) and a measure of weather variability following Buggle and Durante (2021). I show that the positive effect of TFE on individualism is lower in counties with higher weather variability. To investigate mechanisms, I look at church membership as a measure of social capital, and I find that while the overall TFE effect on church membership is negative, it turns positive in places where weather variability is high, consistently with the idea that religious institutions act as a network for risk-sharing and cultural transmission. These effects are stronger in predominantly agricultural counties and where the historical presence of the state is low.