TY  - JOUR
AU  - Fernandez,Raquel
AU  - Fogli,Alessandra
TI  - Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11268
PY  - 2005
Y2  - April 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11268
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11268.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Raquel Fernández
Department of Economics
New York University
19 West 4th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY  10012
Tel: 212/998-8908
Fax: 212/995-4186
E-Mail: raquel.fernandez@nyu.edu

Alessandra Fogli
University of Minnesota
1925 Fourth Street South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
E-Mail: afogli@umn.edu
AB  - We study the effect of culture on important economic outcomes by using the 1970 Census to examine the work and fertility behavior of women 30-40 years old, born in the U.S., but whose parents were born elsewhere. We use past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the country of ancestry as our cultural proxies. These variables should capture, in addition to past economic and institutional conditions, the beliefs commonly held about the role of women in society, i.e. culture. Given the different time and place, only the beliefs embodied in the cultural proxies should be potentially relevant to women's behavior in the US in 1970. We show that these cultural proxies have positive and significant explanatory power for individual work and fertility outcomes, even after controlling for possible indirect effects of culture (e.g., education and spousal characteristics). We examine alternative hypotheses for these positive correlations and show that neither unobserved human capital nor networks are likely to be responsible. We also show that the effect of these cultural proxies is amplified the greater is the tendency for ethnic groups to cluster in the same neighborhoods.
ER  -