Cultural Economics

In new research, Mario Amore, Morten Bennedsen, Birthe Larsen, and Zeyu Zhao examine the symbiotic relationship between working environments and employee well-being, finding that when workers are safe and satisfied, companies profit.

In a new NBER working paper, Charles Hodgson and Shilong Sun show that vertical integration is usually good for consumers, except when firms have both the ability and the incentive to foreclose rivals.  They use the heavily integrated Chinese Film Industry to show that targeting enforcement to the markets where harm is predictable makes it possible to effectively regulate harmful cases and protect consumers.

New research by Sam Peltzman finds that married individuals consistently report significantly higher happiness levels than unmarried individuals across all demographics. Using five decades...

Eric Posner examines how businesses exploit cultural expectations to frame certain activities as non-work, creating a form of monopsony power that allows them to extract labor without compensation in areas ranging from college athletics to digital content creation. He argues that properly classifying these "invisible" forms of work as compensable labor would benefit society, challenging anti-commodification concerns and highlighting the law's struggle to define work in these blurred contexts.

Bruno Pellegrino introduces a novel model developed with Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg that explains the lack of international investment in some countries despite their promise of higher returns. The study finds that removing certain barriers to international capital flows could boost global GDP by 7% and significantly reduce cross-country inequality.

In an excerpt from her new book, Seeing Others, sociologist Michèle Lamont describes the impact of neoliberal ideas on the working class.

Social trust in democratic institutions affects the ability of those institutions to carry out policy. In new research, Rustam Jamilov shows how decreasing trust in the U.S. institutions has reduced the ability of the Federal Reserve to influence the economy in states that exhibit lower levels of trust.