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Romesh Vaitilingam
interviews participants at the
European Economic Association and the Econometric Society (EEA/ESEM) meeting in Budapest, August, 2007.
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Integration of Muslims into British Society
Are Muslim Immigrants Different in Terms of Cultural Integration?
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Using the UK Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities, we explore the determinants of religious identity for Muslims and non-Muslims. We find that Muslims integrate less and more slowly than non-Muslims. A Muslim born in the UK and having spent there more than 50 years shows a comparable level of probability of having a strong religious identity than a non-Muslim just arrived in the country.
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Culture and Institutions
Two words economists have historically shied away from.
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How and why does distant political and economic history shape the functioning of current institutions? This paper argues that individual values and convictions about the scope of application of norms of good conduct provide the "missing link". Evidence from a variety of sources points to two main findings. First, individual values consistent with generalized (as opposed to limited) morality are widespread in societies that were ruled by non-despotic political institutions in the distant past. Second, well functioning institutions are often observed in countries or regions where individual values are consistent with generalized morality, and under different identifying assumptions this suggests a causal effect from values to institutional outcomes. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications for future research. |
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Betting on Hitler - The Value of Political Connections in Nazi Germany
People have wondered if German Big Business backed Hitler
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We examine the effect of close ties with the NSDAP on the stock price of listed firms in 1932-33. We consider not only links between the National Socialists and executives, as was common in earlier work, but also with supervisory board members – whose importance is hard to overestimate in the case of German industry. One implication of our work is that, weighted by stock market capitalization in 1932, more than half of listed firms on the Berlin stock exchange had substantive links with the NSDAP. Crucially, stock market investors recognized the value of these links, sending the share prices of connected firms up as the new regime became firmly established. While the market as a whole rose after Hitler’s accession to power, firms with board members known to favour the party (or backing it financially) outperformed the market by 5-10% between January and May 1933. We show that this finding is robust to a range of additional control variables and alternative estimation techniques.
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Measuring Ethnic Identity and Its Impact on Economic Behaviour
Ethnosizer: Researh into ethnic identity in Germany
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Zimmermann's paper advocates for a new measure of the ethnic identity of migrants, models its determinants and explores its explanatory power for various types of their economic performance. The ethnosizer, a measure of the intensity of a person's ethnic identity, is constructed from information on the following elements: language, culture, societal interaction, history of migration, and ethnic self-identification. A two-dimensional concept of the ethnosizer classifies migrants into four states: integration, assimilation, separation and marginalization. The ethnosizer largely depends on pre-migration characteristics. Empirical evidence studying economic behaviour like work participation, earnings and housing decisions demonstrates the significant relevance of ethnic identity for economic outcomes.
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