Alesina and Giuliano report:
The structure of family relationships influences economic behavior and attitudes. We define our measure of family ties using individual responses from the World Value Survey regarding the role of the family and the love and respect that children need to have for their parents for over 70 countries. We show that strong family ties imply more reliance on the family as an economic unit which provides goods and services and less on the market and on the government for social insurance. With strong family ties home production is higher, labor force participation of women and youngsters, and geographical mobility, lower. Families are larger (higher fertility and higher family size) with strong family ties, which is consistent with the idea of the family as an important economic unit. We present evidence on cross country regressions. To assess causality we look at the behavior of second generation immigrants in the US and we employ a variable based on the grammatical rule of pronoun drop as an instrument for family ties. Our results overall indicate a significant influence of the strength of family ties on economic outcomes.
Here is the link. This topic remains understudied by economists. Biographically speaking, our political views often spring from our experience of our families and our views of what kind of family structure is acceptable. That is partly why true Russian liberals are so hard to find, and also why Russians are not obsessed with the welfare state. Libertarians tend to be family-ornery; compared to their conservative brethren, they are less willing to knuckle down and admit the morally binding power of irrational family obligations.
Addendum: Will Wilkinson has a good post on family.
“the grammatical rule of pronoun drop ”
What does this phrase mean?
It’s like those economic models which assert that the only reason people have kids is to have someone to take care of them in their old age. The idea that people might desire children in and of themselves, like most animals everywhere, seems to fly past their heads.
What is new in this paper? Family ties and community ties are so strong in India among muslims and christians and some castes among hindus like Konkani brahmins and they prosper compared to others.
However, christians and muslims are geographically highly mobile in the state of Kerala in India(check the religion-wise distribution of Gulf migrants; out of ten Keralites in USA, surely nine will be christians).This fact goes againstAlesina’s and Guiliano’s findings.
keith.
have heard of it, but didn’t know it applied to economics. my own encounter with the model i described was in the context of development economics. i was perhaps generalizing too much, and only meant that some ultra-rational economic models do not take account of the fact that humans do not always act in their own self-interest, and sacrifice for their kin, with children in grave circumstances, sometimes unto death.
john -
yeah, there is no reason to live, our genes really just trick us into continuing with this stupid farce (fyi not being sarcastic)
Jenna, a personal question: do you have children? If not, do you intend to? The reason I ask is because in some of the southern European countries where, according to A & G, family is really important, fertility rates are WAY below the replacement rate. Alesina & Giuliano do not address this issue.
I think that family as social insurance for both the young and old is highly underregarded. It is in significant part because of this that I am comfortable as a libertarian calling for large reductions in government transfer payments of most kinds (I actually like unemployment insurance, at least as practiced in the US where it is definitely time limited. Don’t tell anyone), because family, along with a dynamic job market and personal savings, make up the best safety net, while at the same time the government safety net frays family cohesiveness due to its significant redundancy.
Here’s an excerpt from the paper explaining the grammatical rule of pronoun drop, which was new to me:
“We use the intuition of Kashima and Kashima (1998), that language may embed a particular conception about relationships among people. They suggest that the linguistic practice of pronoun drop, particularly the omission of the first-person singular pronoun (e.g., “I” in English), is linked to the psychological differentiation between the speaker and the context of speech. Societies more individualistic in nature tend to emphasize the importance of the individual in the context of speech, so they tend to keep the first-person singular pronoun. More collectivistic societies, on the other hand, tend to drop the first pronoun.”
“Our hypothesis is that societies with weak family ties are more individualistic, therefore should be associated with pronoun drop.”
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