Cultural Capital and Economic Opportunity in Rural India
Abstract:
Cultural capital — specific human capital that lowers the cost of cooperating with the people who control resources — has long been a major field of research in sociology. Economics has been slow to study this concept because of the difficulty in measuring cultural capital and in finding suitable empirical settings to study its effects. Leveraging novel data on the distinct cultural norms of each of India’s nearly 5,000 endogamous social groups (castes, tribes, etc.), we propose a measure of cultural capital based on the cultural distance between each group and the economically dominant group in the village. We measure the effects of cultural capital by comparing members of the same social group in villages with different social environments, i.e. in villages where the same individual would have a different amount of cultural capital. We show that individuals living in villages with culturally distant dominant groups experience substantially lower educational attainment and living standards.
Organized by: Miguel Ortiz
