Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
Content archived on 2024-05-30

How do values influence the functioning of institutions and the effects of policies?

Objective

Many recent contributions by economists have stressed the importance of culture in explaining economic and institutional outcomes. Taking this literature as a point of departure, we study three questions. First, how do values and beliefs influence the functioning of government institutions? We combine recent insights from political economics with the idea that civic values matter through citizens political participation, such as voters behavior and voice activities. Our goal is to lay the foundations for an economic theory of clientelism. We then study empirically voters with different cultural traditions react to news of politicians dishonesty; and how alternative political institutions influence the selection of politicians depending on the cultural environment. Second, what can be done to promote economic development and improve the functioning of government institutions in a society with lack of social capital and poor values? We study empirically two important policy tools. The first is transfers to poor localities from higher levels of governments. If civic values are deficient, transfers might reinforce clientelism. We test various possible channels for such adverse effects. Second, exploiting a natural experiment, we study the effects of decentralizing the selection of university professors. Third, what are the main mechanisms of cultural transmission, and how do they interact with the external environment? We explore the role of schools, families and peers in the formation of values and beliefs, using a unique feature of the large PISA surveys. Schools are a main vehicles of cultural transmission. They are also a public service with a complex organization. We study how values and beliefs, the organization of schools and citizens voice interact with each other. Much of our empirical analysis focuses on Italian regions and municipalities. Although these questions cut across many disciplines, we take an economic approach.

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: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Topic(s)

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.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

ERC-2008-AdG
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

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.

ERC-AG - ERC Advanced Grant

Host institution

UNIVERSITA COMMERCIALE LUIGI BOCCONI
EU contribution
€ 1 068 000,00
Address
VIA SARFATTI 25
20136 Milano
Italy

See on map

Region
Nord-Ovest Lombardia Milano
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data

Beneficiaries (1)

My booklet 0 0