Essays on Culture, Institutions, and Economic Development

Abstract

Culture and institutions are important to understand individual behaviors and economic development. In this thesis, I study the origins of cultural divergence across societies, the emergence of private property rights, and the relationship between private property rights and economic development. First, I discover that the selective migration of individualistic people out of collectivistic societies in the past has left its trace in the cultural divergence along the individualism-collectivism dimension in the present. Second, I show that the state devises property rights to land to maximize tax revenue, producing the rise and fall of private property rights to land in response to changes in population density. Third, I find that private land tenure only has a modest impact on rural economic development. Thus, this thesis demonstrates the importance of history in understanding current economic issues, as well as provides valuable lessons on the privatization of agricultural land.