Project description
How culture shapes economies and vice versa
Economic growth is not just about money. It is also shaped by culture. Norms around gender roles or trust in strangers influence how people work, trade, and cooperate. Studying how culture evolves is difficult due to a lack of long-term data. The ERC-funded LCCED project brings together a team with extensive expertise in economics and data science. The project is developing the world’s first century-long dataset of cultural norms across 4 635 social groups in India. Using AI tools to analyse ethnographic records from 1880–1990, the project explores how culture and development shape one another over time. The data will be open access, enabling new insights into how societies change, and why.
Objective
Culturea set of socially transmitted beliefs and valuesis increasingly discussed as a major driver of economic development. Cultural factors such as trust of strangers and gender norms shape, and are shaped by, the nature of economic activity. Yet economic research on the relationship between culture and development has been constrained by the lack of long-run data on cultural change.
My ERC CoG develops an ambitious research agenda on the two-way relationship between economic development and culture. I will create an unprecedented quantitative panel dataset describing the long-run evolution of cultural norms across Indias 4635 endogamous social groups by digitizing thousands of ethnographic reports produced by the Anthropological Survey of India between 1880 and 1990. I will match them to modern survey data to study the relationship between group-level cultural norms and individual behavior. My research group has already assembled the inputs for this project and proven that large language models like GPT4 can be used to extract standardized data from these ethnographies.
This proposal builds on a research agenda and data science toolkit that I have been developing over the past fifteen years. I will generate three major sets of outputs:
1) The worlds first long-run, large-scale panel dataset on cultural change: standardized data on hundreds of norms across 4635 social groups covering 100 years. To grow the community of scholars working on culture and development, I will make the data open source and I will write a paper describing these data and the text-as-data tools I will develop.
2) Evidence on how culture shapes economic opportunity: two papers will focus on the impacts of cultural capital and cultural diversity shape opportunity, cooperation, and segregation.
3) Evidence on how economic changein the forms of urbanization and climate changeaffects long-run cultural evolution, and how cultural context shapes responses to economic challenges.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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SW7 2AZ London
United Kingdom
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