Lars Harhoff Andersen defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Candidate:

Lars Harhoff Andersen, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Title:

The Wealth of Names: Measuring Values in Economic History

Supervisor:

• Jeanet Sinding Bentzen, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Assessment Committee:

• Casper Worm Hansen, Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
• Edward Glaeser, Professor, Department of Economics, Harvard University
• Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Professor, Department of Economics, Paris School of Economics

Summary:

The Ph.D. dissertation consists of three self-contained chapters, each developing novel ways of measuring cultural values and the way it affects economic and institutional development.

In the first chapter (co-authored with Jeanet Bentzen), we examine the role played by religion for the emergence of modern science and economic growth. To do so, we develop novel measures of religiosity based on arguments in psychology and sociology that given names may reflect cultural identities of parents. To validate our measures, we find that among 487,000 individuals born in Europe between 1300 and 1940, those with religious names were more likely to hold religious occupations, be born after earthquakes and in areas where surveys indicate higher levels of religiosity. Next, we document that individuals with religious names were less inclined to become scientists, engineers, or to engage in advanced studies. For identification, we exploit family links and exogenous shocks to religiosity by earthquakes in migrants' birthplace. Last, we find that declining religiosity is associated with rising economic growth and more patents in cities across Europe. We rule out mechanisms such as differences across Protestants and Catholics, a general preference for tradition, birth-order effects, name-changing, and parental characteristics. The results corroborate a literature arguing that religion may conflict with modern science, which became increasingly important for economic growth after the Technological Revolution.

In the second chapter, the impact of Germanic culture on democratic development in Europe is explored. The paper develops novel methods, using first names to measure the spread of Germanic culture across Europe. Using these methods, I estimate the effect of Germanic culture on democratization from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. First, I find that germanization is associated with the development of the protodemocratic institutions of the commune in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. Second, I find that germanization is associated with a higher level of democratic development at the national level from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. Finally, I find that regions with higher levels of germanization exhibit stronger democratic attitudes in the 21st century. The results contribute to a better understanding of why some regions are more Democratic, in the past and the present. While the idea that Germanic culture was beneficial to the development of democracy has been around for centuries, the present paper constitutes the first econometric test of the hypothesis.

In the final chapter (co-authored with Tom Raster)we test this theory by devising a new measure of bourgeois values from first names in the US census, which we find to be strongly correlated with entrepreneurship and income. For identification, we leverage the ad hoc road trips of two prominent public exponents of bourgeois values in the early 20th century: Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Referring to themselves as “the Vagabonds”, Edison and Ford quasi-exogenously exposed different localities to prominent bourgeois role models across several road trips between 1918 and 1924. Visits by “the Vagabonds” cause an increase in our measure of bourgeois values that, in turn, increase income and the frequency of entrepreneurship. Our findings suggest that culture and values drive innovation and that even moderate shocks to cultural values can have lasting effects.

An electronic copy of the dissertation can be requested here: lema@econ.ku.dk