We examine the two-way interplay between organizational cultures and organizational design, where culture is modeled as the prevailing social identities among workplace groups that can affect project choices. In a setting where cultural dynamics depend on the expected relative payoffs of holding different identities, we investigate how tribalism and charismatic leadership shape organizational dynamics and steady-state cultures. We show how a strong culture can be a virtue when it permits greater delegated authority, but a vice when the culture is poorly aligned with organizational objectives. We apply our analysis to concrete debates about the interaction of design, performance, and culture.

The COVID-19 pandemic struck societies directly and indirectly, not just challenging population health but disrupting many aspects of life. Different effects of the spreading virus—and the measures to fight it—are reported and discussed in different scientific fora, with hard-to-compare methods and metrics from different traditions. While the pandemic struck some groups more than others, it is difficult to assess the comprehensive impact on social inequalities. This paper gauges social inequalities using individual-level administrative data for Sweden’s entire population. We describe and analyze the relative risks for different social groups in four dimensions—gender, education, income, and world region of birth—to experience three types of COVID-19 incidence, as well as six additional negative life outcomes that reflect general health, access to medical care, and economic strain. During the pandemic, the overall population faced severe morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 and saw higher all-cause mortality, income losses and unemployment risks, as well as reduced access to medical care. These burdens fell more heavily on individuals with low income or education and on immigrants. Although these vulnerable groups experienced larger absolute risks of suffering the direct and indirect consequences of the pandemic, the relative risks in pandemic years (2020 and 2021) were conspicuously similar to those in prepandemic years (2016 to 2019)

Reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases may be almost impossible without a green transition-a substantial transformation of consumption and production patterns. To study such transitions, we propose a dynamic model, which differs from the common approach in economics in two ways. First, consumption patterns reflect not just changing prices and taxes, but changing values. Transitions of values and technologies create a dynamic complementarity that can help or hinder a green transition. Second, and unlike fictitious social planners, policy makers in democratic societies cannot commit to future policy paths, as they are subject to regular elections. We show that market failures and government failures can interact to prevent a welfare-increasing green transition from materializing or make an ongoing green transition too slow.

We study the politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats, a major populist radical-right party. Based on detailed administrative data, we present the first comprehensive account of which politicians are selected into such a party. Surveys show that politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats share strong anti-establishment and anti-immigration attitudes that drastically set them apart from Sweden’s other parties. Searching for individual traits that link naturally to these attitudes, we classify the universe of Swedish politicians and voters by social and economic marginalization and exposure to immigration. Politicians from the Sweden Democrats over-represent marginalized groups without strong attachments to the labour market or to traditional nuclear families, which instead are under-represented among politicians in all other parties. Among voters, the Sweden Democrats have higher electoral support in precincts with higher shares of the same marginalized groups. We see the mobilization of the marginalized as an important driver of the party’s success. Finally, we uncover that Sweden-Democrat politicians score lower on a number of valence traits than other-party politicians. In sum, the rise of the Sweden Democrats raised political representation for marginalized groups, but this came at a valence cost. 

This chapter describes the research by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer, who pioneered the experimental approach to understanding poverty alleviation, for which they were awarded the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Economic well-being doubled in the poorest countries between 1995 and 2018. Child mortality has been cut in half relative to 1995, and the proportion of children attending school has gone up from 56 to 80 percent. Any post-intervention differences in the outcome of interest can thus be solely attributed to the treatment. Studies using field experiments are therefore characterized by high internal validity. A key issue is whether experimental results can be generalized to other contexts, whether or not they are externally valid. In the mid-1990s, Michael Kremer and colleagues conducted the first field experiments within development economics in rural Western Kenya.

This paper studies how material incentives and social norms shape ethnic identity choices in China. Provincial policies give material benefits to minorities, which consequently affect the ethnicity choices for children in ethnically mixed marriages. We formalize the ethnic identity choice in a simple framework, which highlights the interaction of (i) material benefits stemming from ethnic policies, (ii) identity costs associated with breaking the norm of following the father's ethnicity, and (iii) social reputations altering the importance of identity costs. Consistent with the model, we find that ethnic policies increase the propensity to break the prevailing norm for mixed families with minority mothers. Moreover, the impact of ethnic policies is larger in localities where more such families follow the norm. More broadly, our study shows (1) how government policies can shape identity choices and (2) how one can allow for both complementarity and substitutability between individual and social motives in empirical analyses.

We review theoretical and empirical research on the dynamic interactions between cultures and institutions. Doing so, we think about culture as a system of values and about institutions as formalized rules of the game. Our presentation is organized around a simple theoretical framework of political agency, which is gradually expanded so as to introduce new links and feedbacks between culture and institutions.

What makes countries engage in reforms of mass education? Motivated by historical evidence on the relation between military threats and expansions of primary education, we assemble a panel dataset from the last 150 years in European countries and from the postwar period in a large set of countries. We uncover three stylized facts: (i) investments in education are associated with military threats, (ii) democratic institutions are negatively correlated with education investments, and (iii) education investments respond more strongly to military threats in democracies. These patterns continue to hold when we exploit rivalries in a country's neighborhood as an alternative source of variation. We develop a theoretical model that rationalizes the three empirical findings. The model has an additional prediction about investments in physical infrastructures, which finds support in the data.

This paper develops a framework to study environmentalism as a cultural phenomenon, namely as reflecting a process of social identification with certain values. The model is used to explain how the shares of environmentalists and materialists in society can coevolve with taxes on emissions to protect society against damages caused by environmental degradation. These policies are determined by electoral competition. However, even though politicians internalize the welfare of those currently alive and pick utilitarian optimal policies, the dynamic equilibrium paths of policies and evolving values may not converge to the steady state with the highest level of long-run welfare.