 Welcome everyone. Good morning on the second day of this conference. Good to see you and good to see so many people here early in the morning. I'm Patricia Justino. I'm UNIWIDE's deputy director and I'm here to introduce the second keynote panel of this conference. We have two distinguished guests with us today. It is my great honor to introduce you to Professor Raquel Fernandez, although I don't think I need to introduce her to this room very much. I know many of you are very familiar with her, very impressive in illustrious career and her work. Raquel is currently the silver professor in the Department of Economics at New York University. She's also a member of the NBR, CEPR, ISA, BRAD, and I'm sure I'm forgetting others. She's held also tenured positions not only at NYU, but LSE, Boston University, Oslo, and others. Raquel has had a series of incredibly prestigious positions, including being vice president of the American Economic Association and president of LSEA, the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association. One of the most impressive aspects of Raquel's contribution in career is the breadth of topics that she's worked and contributed to, from sovereign debt to inequality, gender, and culture and family, which is going to speak to us about today. We absolutely honoured Raquel that you're joining us today and accepted to give this keynote lecture and really look forward to that. And as I've discussed, we have also a very impressive guest and we're very happy to welcome Belinda Arquipon. Belinda is an assistant professor of economics at Barnett College at Columbia University and she's had a very distinguished career and impressive work at the crossing of developing economics, political economy, and economic history with a focus on Africa. We are extremely honoured, Belinda, that you accepted to come and be part of this keynote panel and we look forward to the discussion between the two of you. So what we're going to do is I'll move now to Raquel's talk. Raquel will talk for about 40 minutes or so, then we have Belinda commenting on the presentation and after that I'll open the floor for discussion and then Raquel will have an opportunity to reply to Belinda and also ask questions from the audience so we're hoping that we have a good discussion. Without further ado, I'll give the floor to Raquel and welcome. Welcome again. So thank you very much for having me. Thank you for your very gracious introduction. I'm really thrilled to be here. I have not been in Bogota for probably I would say 15, 16 years so I'm very happy to be in this city again and to be in particular at Universidad de los Andes which I don't think I'd ever visited before. So I'm going to start. My talk, first of all maybe I should say a first comment. The first comment is my talk as you see left out the word gender and that is because over time this became much more about culture and the family and as you're going to see obviously this has big implications for any sort of gender roles that exist in society so it's definitely tied to that but it's not the main focus. So let me start with a question. Why should we care about family and the culture? Why should you bother to sit through this lecture of 40 minutes instead of having more coffee outside? Well people are social animals. They don't just exist in Robinson Crusoe Islands despite you know Econ 101 and they live embedded in social fabrics, social networks in which the family plays a central role and it plays a central role for two reasons that are interwoven. One is that it's a fundamental the family is a fundamental unit that organizes economic activity and two it plays a key role in transmitting social beliefs. These beliefs are tremendously important that's the field of culture. They matter to economic outcomes that affect development that affect inequality that affect welfare. The main message that I would like you to take away from this lecture is that we need to understand differences in family institutions. We need to understand differences in cultural beliefs because ultimately those matter to economic outcomes and in particular if you're thinking about these things from a policy perspective they matter to the way policy is going to interact with the economy. Now much of what I'm going to be saying today is summarized in my chapter with Natalie Bau. It's forthcoming in the Handbook of Family Economics so if you want to see a fuller description of this I would urge you to go there. The this talk is also a bit unusual and is not necessarily focused so much on my work but really on the whole field. What I'd like is for the people particularly PhD students and young assistant professors and old professors too is to take away from here is that taking the family seriously and incorporating it into your analysis is a very interesting thing to do and this is a very dynamic field in economics. Okay so you might want to start with some definitions which I don't particularly love doing but let me do it nonetheless. So you could have a definition for family you see that I've one I've put up here on the slide. It's the smallest group of individuals who see themselves as connected to one another. It fulfills basic human needs providing for children regulating sexuality passing property and knowledge and knowledge is also culture between generations. That's more of an anthropological view of family culture. There's a million and one definitions I've just put the one from the dictionary there and again it's the customary beliefs social forms material traits of a particular group but it also is human knowledge belief and behavior that's transmitted from one generation to the other. Now for those of you who think about institutions primarily you might question whether a family is an institution or whether it's culture and I don't think this is a very useful distinction in general and I'm sometimes sorry when the economics literature goes there we don't distinguish between the two. We think and here I'm colluding a paper by shows and co-authors of the family as a set of culturally transmitted norms that influence a broad set of social relationships and that shake patterns of marriage residence relatedness alliance formation and configure social networks in ways that profoundly influence social incentives and behavior. So I won't get into this whole institutions versus culture. I tend to think of institutions more as formal institutions and the family of course is an informal institution for the most part. There's a lot of variation in traditional family institutions and cultural practices that govern the way the family acts they govern to form that social union such as marriage take place what legitimizes them who inherits who supports parents in their old age and who is considered a family member and I'm just going to give you very very quickly just an idea this is ancestral family practices but of current population groups that it's not necessarily their practice it's rather the ancestral ones this is a paltry locality and we're going to come back to this later I just want to show you that the places that are darker is where paltry locality which is when people go and live in the house or community of the parents of the of the husband of the newly formed couple of the husband that as you can see that has some span across the grove and here for example is another practice at a bride price and again you can see how it varies across the grove so the first thing I'm going to do is nothing related to my own research but it's very interesting I wanted to give you more macro outcomes in some sense of why the family matters and what anthropologists do is that they very much distinguish between places where you know you have a small nuclear family that's not particularly embedded in social networks in large kinship groups and those where kinship groups are tight and one particular tight form or intense form of kinship is that a segmentary lineage and conflict so here I'm going to tell you a little bit about a really interesting paper Muscona Nun and Robinson about a particular form of kinship intense kinship relationships which is a segmentary lineage system and how that relates to conflict so a segmentary lineage system is has unilineal descent that is you trace your descent through the father which is patrilineal or through the mother and that's what makes a matrilineal system as opposed to say in a nuclear family you trace it through both the father and the mother now a segmentary lineage system has subsets or segments of a full lineage of a full lineage they function as autonomous groups so those small little circles that you see there are those ovals those are all different segments of a particular lineage and you can see that triangle this is only showing men so those triangles aren't men only and you can see they start with one person and then they segment off and they keep on segmenting off forming a lineage and what the authors do is to say there might be a relationship and this had been proposed already in anthropology but had not been studied rigorously between having a segmentary lineage and conflict why would that be well in the segmentary lineage if say that individual that you see down on your left hand side with denoted by one has a conflict with the individual on your right hand side denoted by nine then what one would do is expect to form have an alliance and help from everyone who is in that major segment a and everyone and the one the individual number nine would have an alliance with everybody in segment section b so any conflict between one and nine would you know expand to encompass both major segments aligned against one another and you can see why you might think that conflict would be broader and take longer to resolve so the authors study this in in Africa where you have segmentary versus non-segmentary lineage these maps are a little bit hard to distinguish but the dark the first one on the left is showing you in dark ethnic groups that come from segmentary the light gray a non-segmentary and the other ones are not in the sample and then on the right which looks very much like the one on the left because it might be hard to distinguish it has little dots which are the conflict incidents as measured by the ACLED between 97 and 2014 so the authors do a lot of this and I'm just not I'm just going to show you two results one is these partial correlation plots which look at the log of conflict and segmentary lineage conditional on country fixed effects and a whole host of geographic and historical controls and the historical controls have to do with the ethnic group how kind of the politically centralized it was etc and as you can see no matter what type of conflict we're looking at from a through d you see a positive relationship in these scatter plots between and these partial correlation scatter plots between on the y-axis the number of incidents and the x-axis the segmentary lineage after partialing out the other variables the other thing that the authors do to really get rid of to be able to establish more directly the causality the direction of causality is to look ethnic groups that are segmentary versus non-segmentary and compare those live right on the border so take the left to be segmentary the right to be non-segmentary the question is do we see a change in conflict as we move from the right towards the left okay do we see a conflict increase because the segmentary group has might have more conflicts so that's a question that they're doing and the reason that they're doing it this this way is because it's a boundary regression discontinuity and what they want to argue is that other things would be expected to move smoothly what would move smoothly their historical experience perhaps geographic conditions etc so when they do that they get the following been scatter plot on the right you see the distance of the border the border is given by that dash line and sorry that dash line and then as you go towards the right you're getting into within the the area I lived in by the segmentary group on the left the non-segmentary group and as you can see at the border there's a discontinuity so that was a pretty neat paper and I think it is very convincing the relationship between you know extensive kinship groups or intense kinship groups and conflict where else has this kinship intensity raised its head I'm going to talk to you about three things individual psychology per capita GDP we're just just going to be a scatter plot and then looking more at causation so when you there's several authors that have contributed to looking at and hypothesizing about the relationship between the western church and individual psychology and the reason that they have and particularly anthropologists is because the western church very early on started with prohibiting certain types of marriages leverant marriages marriages where the man married the the sister say of his deceased wife they started to rule those things out ban those things and then by the early middle ages they ended up banning mat marriages even to distant cousins they wanted promoted marriage by choice they encourage new married couples to set up independent households and by 1500 uniquely in europe most of europe did not have extensive kinship ties but instead they had monogamous nuclear households bilateral descent mother and father and neolocal residents meaning that you go and you live somewhere where neither your father nor neither their brides parents nor the groom's parents are living the idea is that people who grow up with these type of households as opposed to households with intensive kinship norms might have different psychologies this was very much popularized in the relatively recent book by henrick called weird western educated industrialized i forgot our means rich and democratic there we go and this and if you in particular if you grow up an intensive kinship norm so you're embedded in these social relationships with many many people who form your very extended family that's going to reward greater conformity greater in group loyalty and it would discourage independence individualism and impersonal motivations for fairness and cooperation now all this sounds very negative and i'm not trying to say that it's bad to have intensive kinship roles kinship norms but there are going to be certain downsides so what would be the positive parts things like insurance for example that's going to be much easier to maintain if you're an embedded in a social network than if you're an independent nuclear family but here the question is that they're looking at is one of psychology this is a paper by shelson all and what they look at is on the x axis centuries under the medieval church and on the y axis the cousin marriage rate so what fraction of individuals currently you know basically recently marry their cousins and marriage to cousins is not as unusual as you might think in some parts parts of the world is 50 percent so we're talking about first and second cousins and here as you can see that having spent much many centuries under medieval church you're much less likely to have cousin marriage here they're showing the two things that really matter to them one is that there is a negative relationship between the cousin marriage rate and a measure of what they of what's called individualistic impersonal psychology which is measures proclivities towards individualism and independence lower conformity lower obedience and treating and less likely to treat strangers with the same degree of cooperation and fairness that you would treat your in group okay and so that relationship is obviously negative and then the same relationship can be shown using the centuries under the medieval churches directly so this is a psychological relationship does it matter that's something I think is much less clear for economic outcomes so here's simply a very suggestive graph this comes from a different paper that we oh gosh and co-authors and what it's showing you is on the x axis GDP per capita and this is in logs and on the right axis also in logs the percent of marriages that are between first and second cousins and as you can see again there is a fairly strong negative relationship but this is simply a correlation now you might ask why might this relate this exist and one answer which I like was given in a paper by Hoffman senate chapter in a book where they argue that this might hinder mobility so while these relationships might be very useful in terms of conflict in terms of providing insurance when a society is modernizing and you might need a lot of mobility particularly think about people moving from farms to the cities then it may not be so so positive because you would tend to stay behind as you form part of social fabric either because you yourself want to stay behind or because you face pressure to stay behind so now getting a little bit more towards causality I want to tell you about this paper it's a recent working paper by gosh Huang and squares which I really enjoyed reading and actually just incorporate now into the handbook which has to do with cousin marriage bans in the US so now we really want to get at the question of causality what they do is they look at the large variation that exists in the United States towards banning marriages between cousins this started in the late 1850s in the United States with Kansas and then as you can see on the slide every decade a few more states joined in the authors argued that the variation in timing is due to states entering the union and therefore adopting the more recent legislation and also simply idiosyncratic activism this wasn't the thing that was particularly important for for the US but some senator might get it into his and it was always a his at this point into his head that this was an important thing to roll out in any case what the authors do is to conduct an event study where they compare outcomes for men born in the same state born in the same decade and who have high cousin marriage surnames and they compare those to the same type of men but what low cousin marriage surnames so the only way to really measure are you marrying your cousin at this point is to go back into marriage records and look at your wife and have the same surname as you did when she was single and got and married you so all these are married these measures of the surnames comes in the period prior to the reform prior to 1858 and it's done for the whole us not at a particular state level so the authors run the following regression regression they look at um they look at uh sorry they look at uh outcomes as a function of state cross decade of birth fixed effects state cross high cousin uh cousin marriage surnames a census year fixed effect and then what they're really interested in is how since they're looking at an event study is how uh the outcome changes with the uh decades that pass after the banning in that state of uh cousin marriages so let me show you a few results that I found very interesting the first is you know does this legislation have any impact on cousin marriage rates you'd like to know that it does otherwise you know uh you would you it wouldn't make much of a difference or you would be picking something else up and as you can see uh the decade of the ban is at zero over there and negative one is not shown because those who are people who would be born 10 years before the cousin marriage ban and consequently they might be also affected by the ban and as you can see there is a drop within the same state for men and I should be very clear this is white men history for uh black americans is completely different here and many change their names after freedom so this is for white men uh only okay so um as you can see it really goes down even though we don't really know how much this ban was enforced it obviously had a bite the next outcome I'd like to show you from their paper is the impact of these bans on different measures of urbanization and mobility which is what that hoff and sen paper was discussing at a more theoretical abstract level and as you can see here these are different measures as we go a b c d or one two three four um these are different measures of urbanization and mobility the first one is showing you urbanized people were less likely about three decades later to live in places with small populations the second one is showing you that they're less likely again about three decades later to live in farms the third one is showing you that they're more likely to live in urban settings and the fourth is that when they're picked up in the census they're more likely so again three day three birth decades later to be living in a state different from their state of birth so interstate mobility has gone up and lastly they have several measures of income none of them are exactly the ones that you might think because there's no way to get wages at this point for the us for the most part instead what they have is um an income percentile rank where that income percentile rank is based on a decade by decade kind of socioeconomic index based on the years of education needed for you to be in the occupation that you're in and again what you see here is that for birth cohorts some three to four decades after the bans are instituted uh you see much greater occupational mobility or socioeconomic mobility measured this way and again i'm just going to emphasize this is not showing you that the us has become more socially mobile it's not showing you that the us has become more urban all this is always comparing people with the same with high surname cousin surnames relative to low cousin surnames born same decade born in the same state so it's not picking up a general trend okay enough for those uh both of those i think they're very interesting and i i spent a lot of time learning about these uh papers when i was writing the handbook and modifying it right now at the end next i would like to pass on to the families cultural beliefs and practice so this is where i have worked and so of course i'm the least excited i never understand people who are excited about their own work two years later but any case this is many more than two years later so i don't find it exciting so i will go quick on it so to study the impact of cultural beliefs that the family brings people have followed what i've called and the epidemiological approach um so what the epidemiological approach does is to exploit the fact that beliefs are much more transportable when you move then there are your institutions and economic backgrounds okay so what people do is that they study usually second-generated natives so suppose people have moved to the u.s and immigrated to the u.s you'd be studying the second generation so the kids who were born in the u.s who live in the same geographic area what is a city a town a commuting zone and very often you still have transported other things maybe other than culture with your parents maybe you've transported things that we're not measuring like wealth or like human capital embedded in your parents or your parents education so very often at least for my own work i would control for things like similar education level even if it's taking away some of the impact of culture because if you don't control for it you're not really sure you've gotten rid of the other things that get transported when people cross boundaries um so the idea is again that people these individuals face the same set of institutions but their choices their economic outcomes can differ in a systematic fashion because their parents transmitted different cultural beliefs and the differences somehow are reflecting their country of ancestry a country of orange other parents so this approach has been used to study many outcomes my own work was on married women's labor force participation and fertility uh both on my own and with alessandra foley and also alessina juliana none have worked in this area i'm just going to show you like the classic classic i'm going to show you a scatter on the x-axis i have how much women used to work in 1950 from your in your country of ancestry in 1950 neither the parents were there and certainly these kids were not there i'm looking at them in 1970 and i'm looking at married women and asking about their labor force participation here is the hours worked per week in the u.s in 1970 given that your parents were born say in lebanon in mexico spain cuba etc and as you can see and this is this is just a raw scatter plot and another regression is controlling for your own education your husband's income your husband's education uh to try to get rid of other sources of variation that aren't coming from culture although you might think that those things would be affected by culture as well and we find a strong positive relationship this has also been used to study the relationship between various measures of gender roles or uh sexism bluntly um towards gender gaps in mass scores uh incidents of intimate partner violence a different form of uh of uh not gender roles but a different form of uh discrimination against women which would be preference towards sons and sex selective abortions again this is all following the epidemiological approach so this is outside of their country this is looking at people in a different country uh the traditions of metrolocality and petrolocality and what we saw before psychological characteristics they also apply the epidemiological approach okay so that's uh i'm done with that part now i want to tell you about two different cultural practices that have to do uh with marriage payments okay so payments at the time of marriage were really common throughout the entire world and they typically could be classified as a dowry or as a bride price and uh bride price were are widespread in sub-saharan africa and dowry is still widely practiced in india but also it's becoming more popular in other parts of uh south asia uh in modern context where you would think that bride price and dowry can be thought of marriage clearing transfers and as such you would expect them and maybe the whole practice to be affected by things like technological change environmental change policies etc and what i want to show you is that the way that the family is organized its cultural beliefs can have very different effect depending on what the family practices so here i'm going to uh summarize a paper by ashraf bow nun and voena and what they do is to look at human capital investments and how that might interact with bride price particularly when a policy is introduced so if you ask well why does uh you know why do we have certain family institutions a leading hypothesis is that it helps to you know compensate for markets that might be missing on the other hand even though those markets may no longer be missing it might take a long time for these cultural practices to disappear it depends now the authors investigate that the reason that a buy price might exist is because it allows imperfectly altruistic parents to capture some of the investments that they make and their daughter by capturing the marriage markets part of the marriage market returns to education so the idea is this is the bride price is going to incentivize parents to invest more in in their child's and their daughter's education if they can get some of the returns via bride price to that investment so they look at two countries indonesia and zambia as you can see um there's what they've got what we've grabbed here is people are coming from different ethnic groups uh they have different intent these ethnic groups have different uh probably different practices and not all of them come from ancestry that practice bride price so looking at the current population both in zambia and in indonesia the darker colors are associated with ethnic groups uh that were practiced that were more likely to be practicing bride price so both between indonesia and zambia they're going to distinguish between individuals whose ethnic group practice bride price and those that did not and it's very important to note that no ethnic group practiced dowry first they show that the hypothesis is true in the sense that in both countries girls receive more education if they come from bride price ethnicities and they attempt to rule out other explanations like the parents might be wealthier uh maybe they have lower fertility those parents and that's why you know they're wealthier or have lower fertility which makes them uh the factor wealthier on a per per child basis that's what makes them uh more educated and they rule those out and also the link is there in both countries girls with more education receive higher bride price so education is valued which is what you need and then they study uh two school construction programs the one that is most famous probably is the one in indonesia in which they built a large number of primary schools between 1973 and 1978 this was esters to close paper from a long time back she studied um treated versus untreated cohorts in the same district in indonesia and found that when these schools were introduced it had a positive effect on boys education and that this effect was larger in districts with more school construction that was the point of that paper it was a long time ago and it was really showing okay you know schools matter the possibilities for education matter at least for boys subsequent studies however did not find any effect on female education so ashraf and her co-authors did was to revisit the setting but they now distinguish between bride price addition and those without bride price tradition in indonesia and again they compare treated versus untreated cohorts within the same district and they find that ethnic groups with a bride price tradition did increase the girls rate of primary school completion whereas the other groups did not so the negative result was really resulting from um the other groups um but here you see that when there's an opportunity to invest more in girls these parents did a similar school expansion happened in zambia a longer period maybe a little bit less neat in terms of thinking about how this was randomized in any case once again they compare against across districts with different numbers of schools and uh what they find is that um there is no effect in general of being in a district with more school for girls but again at the district level if you distinguish between girls from bride price traditions versus non-bride price traditions you see that the places where the districts of more schooling see increases in schooling for girls that come from a bride price tradition so your ideas about whether schools are going to make a difference or not really need to take into account what the cultural beliefs of different families are to be able to distinguish its true effects so now i want to tell you about a different practice which is that of dowry and how it interacts with some preference in particular in the face of gold price shocks so here i'm talking about a paper by balotra chakravati anguleski and first a little bit of history dowry uh was historically it's very important it was primarily a bequest a parental property to the bride it has disappeared in most of the words world persistent contemporary india despite being prohibited since 1961 it's become more common in Bangladesh pakistan and Sri Lanka nowadays instead of the dowry necessarily going to the bride it actually is often appropriated by a groom and his family so it's really acting uh as a groom price okay this is the price for the men in india there is dowries are very large sometimes four to eight times annual income household income gold is a very important part of these dowries some estimates range from 70 to 90 percent of households in india give dowry and 95 percent of those who give report giving gold uh given how expensive it is families start to save for dowries upon the birth of a girl so what the authors do is to study the negative effects of the interaction between having this dowry tradition and what happens when gold price increases and the main idea there exploring is that an increase in the price of gold is going to make daughters more expensive it might make sons less expensive since now the son is getting and his and you as his parents are getting some of that dowry and it's potentially going to lead parents to want fewer girls and more boys uh i want to note from the outset that this argument this main idea requires the amount of gold not to adjust completely when the price of gold changes so a price of gold is going to make your girl more expensive but if the amount if sorry if the um if if it adjusts it completely you will be left with you know paying the same dowry price as before and the first thing they show is about the the dowry's value increases by 80 percent of the percentage price of increase of gold now the price of gold is not determined it's determined on the world market it's highly variable i'll just show you the two pictures it follows around a mock i won't show you more than that what the authors do is that they study what is the outcome of to the second born of the second born child why the second born child well there's evidence that families want one girl and if you were to study third or four for fifth born there's potentially greater selection in unobservable family characteristics when family have more than two kids they differentiate between two periods 1972 to 85 which is pre ultrasound and then the period 85 to 2005 in which ultrasounds allows prenatal sex selection they control for a large set of variables that you can see there rainfall state year birth month fixed effects the sex of the first child etc and they show that increases in the price of gold for the pre ultrasound period are associated with higher neonatal mortality for girls so they're more likely to die in the first year after birth if they thought there was an important price increase in gold in the first month after they're born for the second period after ultrasound exists they don't find any effect on neonatal mortality but instead what they find is a much lower probability that the second child that newborn is a girl so the sex ratio becomes a much more skewed towards boys so they show further evidence regarding the mechanism they differentiate between those families with a first born born boy relative to a first born girl and they show that the results are driven by those the second born child would have had a sister as a first born rather than a brother as a first born it's driven by those they differentiate on religious grounds muslim christian and hindu since this uh practice of dowry is much more prevalent in hindu families than it is in muslim and christians and shows the results are driven by the hindu households and as an interesting uh further note they show that the stature of individuals who are between the ages of 15 and 50 prior to being able to have the ultrasound technology if you were born in a year in which you had higher gold prices this is associated with women but not men being lower height than average so again uh the disfavor uh the the discrimination against the girl child okay so i've done all this on culture and showing how it interacts with some policies um now i want to talk about how uh culture can change so first of all there's nothing static about culture this is often something i have to say to people even study culture because often people define it as something that is unchanging over time there's nothing static about culture the rate of change of culture is an endogenous variable and that's a way it should be thought about so one question that you might ask yourself is why does culture change and since we're economists we think it's going to change in response to changes in incentives and those changes in incentives are given by you can call them loosely shocks changes in technology policy shocks technology shocks knowledge environmental shocks it also can change in response to things that make the ability of others to monitor or to punish transgressors change so again culture's not just an internal belief cultures a social belief and as such is maintained through rewards and punishments so the reason that men might hear not be wearing skirts today aside from the fact that it's cold might be because if you came in in a skirt everyone would stare at you so that's a way that culture is going to punish transgressors we will monitor you and kind of look at you strangely so but these are just after all cultural beliefs there's nothing to say that uh men can't wear skirts just like women sometime back could not wear pants that change as well so culture can also get stuck and that's an important thing to understand is a cultural change like almost any other change will create winners and losers so when people resist cultural change it's not just because of embedded beliefs but also because of the damage that changing those beliefs might do to maybe their economic prospects or the simply their their span of control so um my co-author natalie bow studied cultural change uh with respect to pension policies and this is a very interesting study she studied the introduction of a pension plan in indonesia and in gana indonesia has matrilocal and neolocal ethnic groups whereas gana has patrilocal and neolocal ethnic groups again matrilocal means that they mean and they go and live with the the wife's parents the neolocal they live elsewhere and patrilocal they live with the groom's parents once they're married now why do these practices exist one of the reasons that people speculate these practices exist is because it provides parents with care in their old age it gives them an additional incentive to invest in the human capital of their kids because they're going to reap some of the marriage market and labor market returns of their kids by having them live with them now in indonesia which is matrilocal so they go and live with the parents of the bride daughters relative to sons in the same household so now we're at the household level so we can be sure that we're not missing some information in terms of household wealth or other attributes of the household daughters relative to the same house sons in the same household are more likely to be enrolled in school in matrilocal ethnic groups than daughters versus sons that come from the neolocal ethnic groups so we do see more investment in girls in those groups and gana which is patrilocal sons relative to daughters within the same household are more likely to be enrolled in school they come from patrilocal ethnic groups then sons versus daughters from neolocal ethnic groups the question that they study is what happens when a pension plan is introduced and the main idea that they're exploring is a pension plan is going to reduce the dependency of parents on their kids which then might affect the reasons that you want to invest in your kids in the first place now this was a completely stuck cultural practice it wouldn't be effective but this investment in kids is going to be affected here showing how much the incentives matter so they explore both cohort variations in particular daughters who would have been too old to receive more education in Indonesia and different intensity of treatment how the pension plan was rolled out in particular how many pension plans offices they are in that district so they're basically doing a triple difference by also comparing across ethnic groups and what they find is for Indonesia that women's education fell in magical local relative to neolocal ethnic group when these pension plans were introduced they fell more in those places which had larger pension plans or a more intense pension plan rollout and there was no differential effect on males education by ethnic group practices so the pension plan affected culture are here in a negative fashion and that they invested less in their daughters at but the real that's you can think maybe education is not a cultural practice and I would agree in some sense but would it really affect it was a practice of matrilocality and what they show is matrilocality decreased more for those cohorts that were treated more intensely they do a similar study for for Ghana which also had a pension plan introduced and they find similar results but this time for men from patcher local groups those men's education decreased as did the practice of practice locality the last thing I'm going to tell you before I turn it over to my discussant is to talk to you very briefly about a different sort of modern family although I won't touch upon the family part which is that between people of the same sex so this is a paper on why did attitudes to word same sex relationships change and what I show you in that graph this is a paper with Sahar Partha and also Virango what I show you in that graph is that ever since this question was asked is it wrong for same-sex adults to have sexual relations you see that for basically a span of you know 20 30 years nothing happened okay basically the the share who thought it was either never wrong or some only sometimes wrong for this for same-sex adults to have sexual relations didn't change what I'm graphing here just to be clear is a share who we call approved same-sex relationship which are the people who answered it's those are the people who answered never wrong or sometimes wrong what I'm leaving out is the people who answered it's always wrong or almost always wrong and as you can see there's a break in the data one can show this quite rigorously between 91 and 93 there's a big upwards jump and then it takes off so the people are increasingly approving of same-sex relationships and I have a graph until 2017 here so by 2017 this is in the United States representative sample general social survey about 60 percent of people approve so the first question we asked is why did approval jump in between 92 and 93 we don't have a any information for whether it was whether it happened in 92 or 93 we have 91 and 93 as our data so in 1981 so 10 years later earlier it was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic now the AIDS epidemic did not make people more sympathetic towards same-sex relationships in fact if you look closely at the data you will see that approval went down during this period what it did though was it organized same-sex individuals behind a common cause you might have been before a gay republican a gay democrat this was no longer the case now you were united the most most important thing was to find a cure for AIDS other important things was to find insurance for a health insurance for your same-sex partner etc so this rallied everyone behind a common cause and the democratic party was more sympathetic towards it on the ground and so they really start they created packs a very important pack that still exists today and gave money to the democratic party so our argument is this this shock AIDS over time created a very potent political group that had money because it spanned all the income distribution in the u.s and that was really ready to be courted and though this this happened at the national level in 1992 during the presidential election which in the u.s was bill clinton versus george george w bush george bush senior where the republican and democratic parties for the first time ever took explicitly opposing stands about gay people serving openly in the military which was prohibited at that point so as you know clinton won the election and this gave rise to a public debate in congress that went on for all of 1993 it ended up being the compromise don't ask don't tell which is we're not going to ask you if you're gay and you're not going to tell us don't tell us whether you're gay or not so it wasn't really what was wanted but it was better than what existed before and what these two graphs want to show you is that there was a very large jump in media coverage during this time period if any of you are old enough to remember when we used to get the the news via evening news at least in the u.s then that's what people watch so what i'm showing you on the left hand side in that bluish purple line is a number of news segment dedicated in each year to gay related topics where gay related is by searching for certain key words and the one in yellow is doing the same thing but for AIDS related stories obviously there's going to be an overlap between gay related stories and AIDS related stories and that dash line is showing you that overlap as you can see 1993 there's a huge increase in gay related stories that large increase is not due to AIDS related stories as you can see by the fact that that dash line is going down that same point there's a lot more media attention mainstream media attention can be seen for newspaper articles which look at a balanced panel of i think 59 newspapers from 1987 to almost 2005 i think 2003 and the share of newspaper articles on average that are dedicated to gay related topics again searching for keywords and again you see the spike in 1993 so there's a lot more attention being given to these topics what we hypothesize is that the public debate and the far greater salience of gay related issues let people to reconsider their positions towards same sex individuals and that this initiated a process of cultural change and diffusion of different values over time now this is a national event and so we can't get variations since it's national except over time so what we do is we argue that individuals from places that is from states in one part counties is another data set with greater exposure to gay individuals and thereby with greater exposure to mobilization a greater number of grave friends and acquaintances people are coming out during this period local news greater local news then these places these plea people will be more affected and you could take this to be either from salience or from contact theory how do we measure exposure to gay individuals it's not so easy we measure exposure to gay individuals via cumulative hiv cases in 1992 or by the proportion of households in the 1990 census who for the first time are asked a question about whether there's another adult of the same sex living there as a partner and what we show is that those places of greater exposure are the ones that change their minds and those that's where you see the greatest impact this is of course controlling for a lot of things that are different across counties etc and in particular there's a state and county fixed effect across these decades but also income size of the city town sex race education etc so we consider this as an example of how incentives for people to come out to mobilize and to organize ultimately led ultimately led to a process of cultural change once the institutions of the national parties and the media changed their incentives in terms of how much attention they gave to these issues okay let me conclude I'm a bit over time I think so social beliefs and family cultural traditions matter a lot I hope you've understood to economic outcomes whether it's women's labor force gender segregation time spent with children especially things that relate to women the importance of culture in the family's essential role is often overlooked in economics I think it's very important I I encourage you to think about it when you're thinking about your research and I hope that what I showed you in the last two slides our is that culture is not destiny beliefs change and often radically in response to other changes and but that nonetheless policy when you're formulating policy you need to take culture into account without becoming a slave to it thank you very much all right thank you very much Raquel for very very nice very very informative paper and presentation I'm going to set my timer for 10 minutes but I see there's a clock over there so I'm going to watch there as well because I still I have 10 minutes but I'm going to be discussing this paper I highly recommend Raquel mentioned you know going in and looking at the book chapter highly recommended it is very rich very informative and really kind of adds to our understanding which I'm very happy to see the literature has progressed since you know I started studying this in grad school but really adds to our understanding of the organization of family and its role in the transmission of culture for economic outcomes so Raquel had a very very rich discussion already and I won't spend too much time summarizing what you already said but I'm going to highlight three takeaways and I'm going to give you three main comments as a discussant for this chapter so first first takeaway I think I mentioned this and reiterated this very well throughout culture is andogenous very very important to notes this and its implications for how we think about policy number two family is the main structure for transmitting culture number three culture has very real effects on economic outcomes and inequality and vice versa right and this also then I mentioned has very important implications for how we frame effective policy for economic development so I'm going to give you three main comments I mentioned focused on thinking about how we define culture and why we should care when is culture beneficial to economic development right so I think there are a number of papers that have shown when culture is detrimental to economic development and trying to see you know the flip side of this and also suggesting future or further areas of study for people interested in doing more on this topic which I think we should all be interested in doing more on this topic so it's again very important topic all right so defining culture and why we should care so again Raquel had a very very nice discussion on this I just want to highlight some more things here so so oftentimes my favorite definition or I should say my favorite definition is to think about culture as a set of informal institutions right so you think about social norms think about beliefs that influence group behavior and decision-making so that said it is very very difficult to define concretely what it is right so so this is me time trying to type in culture into our econ database and this is a very very simple figure that I came up with right this is from Alberto Visine and very not simple at all right it's very very very non-simple and and they were trying to kind of outline this this link between its formal institutions as Raquel referred to them in formal institutions culture and how these things interact with each other over time but again just to highlight how difficult it is to really pin down this definition of what culture is okay on this point on culture being endogenous then the question is where does culture come from so Raquel mentioned this and this is something that we are learning more about culture is affect and is affected by environment so thinking about the natural environment it affects formal institutions and is affected by formal institutions which then affect and turn economic outcomes so again going back to the the Visine and Verdiagraph from from the last figure so there's a nice paper that I want to highlight on the environment side which I you know I think maybe we didn't get to cover too much in the in the chapter I think this so just new paper from Basi, Fisbian and Grebersi Lassi I think he came out in Colometrica 2020 and they basically try and link American individualism to this American frontier right so you see the picture you see the you know settlers that go to the west right and and highlight the links between the terrain the isolation of the environment how difficult it is to survive in the American frontier to values around you know that prize American individualism today by looking at the surnames I think of the children so of different generation of children or sorry not surnames first names and it's very interesting right so people start giving their kids much more creative names and this is what they use as a measure of individualism and very nice paper kind of trying to let us know again how environment is linked to these these informal institutions and culture so so Raquel very nicely covered the the role of formal institutions so thinking about marriage markets which is something that I also do some work on and thinking really about the role of bride price versus dowry right so I like to you know I think we might know what they are you know this is the transfer from the from the groom's family to the bride's family Ghana this is in India this is the transfer from the bride's family to the groom's family and Raquel covered this in thinking about how economic shocks negative shocks can then have very disparate effects depending on whether you're in a bride price culture or you're in a dowry culture right so formal institutions environment and these are the things that affect and are affected by culture so why should we care so again Raquel did a very very nice job going over this I'm gonna just highlight some things again and highlight this point especially in particular that not accounting for culture can make your policy interventions fail right so what does that mean so you know Raquel presented this school constructions paper very nice paper from Ashraf et al that looked at the role of bride price traditions on the on female education right so by the school constructions that were happening in Indonesia versus Zambia also very very nice discussion I get highly recommend everyone read this paper on looking at intimate partner violence IPV and how increases in or declines in kind of cyclical male employment is associated with IPV depending on where you are and the cultures in where you are so they look at developing countries as the Balotra et al paper and then they look at the US in the UK and you get very very different signs right on the links between cyclical employment of men and women and IPV depending on where you are and they highlight again this idea of male status in societies this cultural factors has been important in understanding why your signs might flip when you're looking at these effects also another big one I know there are a lot of development economists in the room right development economics conference so cash transfers right so there's a new kind of body of work trying to understand the effects of cash transfers transfers on household welfare and IPV and how that might depend on culture right so how women status within the household women's bargaining power within the household is viewed and also how kind of challenges to the male images of breadwinner especially in very patriarchal societies might affect then the effects of these cash transfers to households so we also have very new work right so on online labour markets in Nigeria I do a lot of my work in Nigeria and one of the things I stood up towards in the descriptive data paper for coming was that you know if you look at just within hiring managers so looking at hiring managers looking at applicants that are applying on these online labour markets and you said okay what is the effect of gender on hiring in these online labour markets right so we're talking about structure transformation online labour markets are quite big and growing everyone has access to ICT these days so if you just look at gender and you look at the outcomes for hiring you don't see any effects when you add hiring manager fixed effects however when you look at the the interaction between gender and it and co-ethnicity with the hiring manager then you see quite significant effects right so essentially hiring managers are much more likely to hire co-ethnic men much less likely to hire co-ethnic women and what's happening these women are applying for senior positions within the firm and so what we think is going on is that again cultural norms around you know can a woman be senior to me from my group in my workplace is playing a role here in terms of the hiring but again if you just looked at gender without considering this you would say oh there's no gender bias there's nothing you know no effect here so just highlighting again why it's important to study culture okay on the second comment when is cultural beneficial to economic development there is a nice body of work going back a few years so samples at Al have talked about you know cultural norms as being important and I think Raquel touched on this in promoting pro-social or cooperative norms right so like my favourite story so this is he has this book my favourite story from the book was my study on preschool parents picking their kids up from preschool that you guys have heard this story and essentially you know economists the teachers were very upset that parents would come and pick up their children late from preschool all the time so of course you know talk to the economists what do economists say we're all economists oh yes provide economic incentives make it costly for them to pick up their children late of course then what did the parents do they stop picking up their children even later why because now they have completely foregone the pro-social norms of not trying to you know leave your your students or your kids teacher they're very late because they have families they want to go back to but I say no you can just pay it's now a fee pay the teacher and you can leave your kid there for as long as you like right so so this concern of you know economic incentives crowding out pro-social norms and the role of culture in promoting pro-social norms I think it's something that is also very very important to study here okay my final comment in my last minute so one of the the kind of thinking about the further areas of study I think this is less covered in the in the chapter which is again very rich so I have a couple you understand not much not much space to cover everything but then about the role of religion right I think this this this literature and the economics of religion is very very exciting very very important considering the huge role religion has in many of our lives right so we can think of religion as maybe both in the realm of formal and informal institutions and one of my favorite recent papers comes from Oriole et al I believe it was published in the QGE in 2020 and they essentially look at the relationship between religiosity and religion and economic outcomes using evidence from Ghana and highlight how for example religious donations are viewed by many people as a substitute for formal insurance right so when you don't have access to formal insurance you pray a lot and you say we hope that God will protect us right and you go to the church and you give donations in the church because partly you are trying to ensure yourself against negative shocks and so what they find is that when they introduce formal insurance people then take up formal insurance and reduce religious donations to their churches and that's my clock telling the algorithm out of time almost done so very very important aspect I'm thinking again going back to Raquel's point on the role of policy in shocking cultural norms and also then the importance right people are using maybe what might be somewhat suboptimal ways of ensuring against shocks maybe we should have more formal insurance so that people don't necessarily have to depend on you know the church same thing again there's a new papers on thinking about how shocks increase religiosity very very big area this is one of the things I hope you know any grad students or junior scholars or senior scholars anyone looking for a new research agenda I think this would be a fantastic thing to study because we just know so little about this aspect of culture and then finally on race at an ethnic discrimination right so there is a new not new it's old but hopefully you're thankfully getting much more study with the new increased study on on group-based inequality but this is this literature and stratification economics that tries to understand the origins of persistent group-based inequality right so you have this new issue in the JEL that came out solidarity etc and co-authors are trying to understand again what is the role of these institutions formal institutions and also what we don't really understand is trying to understand the role of the family right given that the family again is an important center of transmitting values what is the role of the family in transmitting suboptimal values around race race or ethnic discrimination that might then lead to persistent negative outcomes for group-based inequality so two areas for further studies and again thank you very much to Raquel for a very very interesting very informative paper okay thank you very much well it was a great talk and a great set of provocative thoughts about how to move forward let's open now the floor to discussion and I can't see anything from here who wants to start it any hands up okay so thank you for a very interesting presentation it was really nice to see a very concise presentation of how culture and family interact and how it evolves so my question is more about you know the culture being endogenous right so since the process is so slow right it takes a long time and especially thinking about it being transmitted through family members and you know how it happens given that people who are going to be the losers from this cultural change are the ones who are in power at the moment right so it's it's going to be very difficult to do this because it's not incentive compatible for them to support such cultural changes so do we have any evidence of how this cultural change you know which is going to be very slow how it can be accelerated or you know how do we know anything about that could you also introduce yourself briefly and anyone else that asks questions as well sorry yeah i'm looking up of the indian studies to the institute thank you okay can i okay i'm mariano tomasi from university of san andres in argentina uh first i just remarked to to rakel at my age i have difficulties sitting 40 minutes listening to a talk but this time it was very easy it was very very engaging very very motivating just two minor comments in terms of motivation for why we should study family perhaps we might add the fact that all modern knowledge suggests that human development is so temporal dependent and everything that happens very very early matters for your whole life and obviously what happens very very early happens in the context of the family that's why the family is the main producer of human development in some sense and connected to that and we were chit chatting here with Santiago about that another crucial component of family formation cultural and characteristics of different societies are these patterns of a assault that they've made in in some sense of the extreme version of some of the things you mentioned about the more society what version of that and as we were discussing here there are little simulations there that show that if you were able to change the norm of positive assault that they might think you would reduce inequality in a dimension that no successful welfare state could ever do thank you thank you very much and i think first just to welcome the presentations i mean i found it quite insightful um my name is ayabonga from the university of at barter's front in south africa i have a question and i think it came through from belinda's presentation around intimate partner violence and the link between that and some of the studies she'd looked at between that and cyclical male unemployment and i'm quite interested in whether or not you come across any studies that are able to look at the link between intimate partner violence and actually structural rather than cyclical male unemployment but i think one of the things we're dealing with in south africa is not only you know the significant incidents and prevalence of intimate partner violence but also the interface between that and structural rather than cyclical male unemployment and then maybe i think the second part of the question is around just the comment you are making around the role of social transfers in tilting the balance of power within the household so i'd be interested to hear just a bit more of your reflections on that thanks thank you and one final one maybe okay yeah it works so there's no way i'm remembering anyone's name and i barely could see where the four person was sitting i never found him so so let me start with um you know cultural change again the idea that it's going to be slow because it's going to take through generations and then it's resisted by the older generation and that then contributes to its slowness i mean i think there's a bit of truth on that but there's also evidence in other directions first of all not all cultural change or maybe not even most cultural change leads to intergenerational conflict it it can be within the same generation the conflict and so you would have one group that might want it and one group that may not if you think about uh women's role in society then there's was this nice study by washington abon abonia washington which showed that uh you know male congressmen who had daughters which much more sympathetic about voting on female issues positively on female issues than those that did not so again there is an aspect of intergenerational altruism which might get more turned on purely for selfish reasons because you care about your daughters or because knowledge having daughters makes you understand more what the consequences of certain views are or certain cultural practices are second in terms of examples the one of social change being fast when you look at attitudes towards same-sex relation and not just attitudes but legal changes that have occurred in many countries in the world not just the united states not just europe but also argentina and i'm not sure if uruguay also changed but in any case these are changes that you know we're very rapid in that scheme of things and while it might be true that older generations and you can show that we're more conservative if you look at the same opinions the same question and asked by generation older ones are more conservative serve it up nonetheless everyone changed it's not just young generations who changed their minds so even cultural beliefs that one holds at the age of 40 are subject to change mariano thank you very much for your questions um so i guess one question i would have is is a sort of uh mating a sort of marriage a norm or is it an incentivized practice and i would argue that there is room for both in the sense that it's not not so much i would call it a norm but i would say one paper that i did with nezzie guner and john knolls and i was studying assortative matching looked at the correlation simply a correlation but nonetheless very interesting between the degree of assortative matching across countries and the degree of inequality across countries the idea being i assume you're not bill gates for a second the idea being that if you're giving up more to marry down you're more to be less willing to do that and what is giving up more means giving up more money okay so if you're going to have a husband or wife who is less educated than you so i'm talking about sorting only at the educational level here you're going to be less willing to do so and there's a very strong relationship in the data on the other hand what else it goes on you don't hopefully marry your spouse just for money but you also love your spouse in the best of cases and love is something that's fermented by spending time with people so that's why people marry you know in college or they marry in with their graduate school classmate you only marry the people you know and you tend to know people of the same background think about your phd program how many unfortunate phd graduate women and i'm kidding by the way married phd men because they were in the same class of them but it's it's true not the unfortunate part but women because there's so few of them end up being disproportionately married in economics to another economist and anyone who's ever tried to hire a female economist knows that a big question is can you get a job for her spouse so it's another burden that women face you know not by choice and not because there's discrimination when they are in the economics job market so please take that into account when you choose to marry you know so i think if you mix people more and i'm not talking about the elite levels now college and and graduate school we don't care so much necessarily what happens there though it has consequences but if you think about secondary schools where you also meet people then imagine that you meet people from many more backgrounds than from say an elite background or for a poor background and you know of course this relates to chetty's recent paper that founds at schools there were more mixed people who were from poor backgrounds tended to do better not necessarily through marriage but maybe simply from peer effects and studying but also information knowing that you should want to go to a good college knowing that it's not that hard to get into a good college if you have good grades or having something to strive for so in any case i do think it can be very much affected by institutional structures in the country i'm going to let uh but linda talk mostly about ipv and structural uh issues good luck i'll just add my own thing to that uh which is that um that work is a little bit all over the place in terms of what it finds so when we look through that literature we could not find you know one conclusion uh is very hard to do structural because you need to find some source of variation to be able to do a rigorous analysis and that's why a lot of the analysis looks at uh at you know cyclical fluctuations uh i really would think that there's nice room for papers that look at you know not i think that they look at how easy it is for men and women to divorce i think it's not just that it's also how easy it is for women to support themselves if they walk away um but right now the the evidence is mixed and lastly on transfers and balance of power so i think a lot of economists think that you give more money to women let's say which cash transfers and they tend to be made better off that makes them have a greater bargaining power than the family and i think that's questionable and we've seen more studies that say that's questionable because in the end it depends how appropriable that transfer is okay and so if you can be appropriate or if the man resents it as it happens to be the case with some of the studies on apv actually they find that when women's employment goes up women suffer more ipv incidents because there is some it seems to people seem to think that it's a psychological mechanism a backlash mechanism against those things and lastly but not least i really want to thank belinda for her excellent discussion and for a lot of the papers that she brought to my attention which we should have incorporated probably but it's very hard to it's like a running race you're always behind uh but we will certainly take them into account for the future and i certainly want to read them including very much yours so i i will just add one more thing thank you very much again rakel i will add one more thing to the cash transfer i think she answered the ipv i don't know that literature as well um so i'm Nigerian and you know the the women in my family always said a woman should have a separate bank account that the man doesn't know about completely i may i take no stance normative stance on that i'm just stating the statement and one of the things that this literature has started doing is to say we'll have the cash transfers to women and this is in the experimental stuff i see coming out recently but we'll make it so that the woman can hide the amount that she's getting right and so there are starting to actually see that then you know the the kind of women saving spending etc behavior changes very very drastically depending on whether she can hide the amount that she's getting and this is enough in sub-Saharan Africa so you know just that's the context but depending on the amount that she she is getting in these like experimental studies so so this just goes back again to highlight this point that you know really understanding the cultural context is very very important for us especially as development economists that are interested in influencing policy right because it can very very much change how the your policy like the impacts of your policy uh and and you know for good or for for ill and we hope for good uh but by studying these informal institutions you can then much much much better uh frame effective policy for development so to add better okay thank you very much okay we have time for a couple quick questions if anyone wants to come back into the debate no okay then i have oh there's someone there okay sorry can the the lights are impossible there's someone right there microphone please thank you so much for the amazing talk um really excited about it and uh my name is Yasmin Abdel Fateh i'm from University of Prince Edward Island Cairo campus and i just want a little elaboration on the saving for the women i believe it's really crucial especially for developing countries so if you would like give us more on the literature that's been done that would be great thank you thank you very much for the question and yes i i don't know if we can send if we post some of the resources of definitely rakel's paper and uh you know we can post some of the references for the for this newer experimental work on that yeah oh if not here then there's someone in the middle just behind yeah thank you uh nears as of the love from monash university in malaysia my question is to rakel and it relates to the definition of uh culture where you include social norm but when i was reflecting on the lecture and thinking of certain social problems we face such as our new marriage there is and again female labor force participation there is equal emphasis and often separation of culture and social norm for example issues of sanction and stigma therefore there are papers and interventions targeting changing community social norm leaving aside family specific cultural practices so therefore as if there is a two horse race and if you were to bet which one would you put your money on that well for example if you were to address this problem of mass early marriage which is a problem in south asian uh southern africa in southern parts that well whether you would advocate reforms that would bring about changes in family specific culture or would you promote interventions that would focus on shifting community specific social norms thank you okay so the first one was about education and ipv that was a question that was asked in spanish i'm going to answer in english is that okay because i want everybody so the the question was when we see these women's education go up do we see not not ipv but necessarily violence towards women go down and i don't know of studies that have looked at this i know that in the cross section more education is associated with less reported violence at least in the household but i don't know that for these sort of changes which are induced by policy i don't know of any study that has looked at it and maybe maybe belinda does and and then for culture versus social norms you know i know yon elster relatively well and we would always get into discussions about social norms versus culture i do not make a distinction i know that some people do i do not make a distinction between the two and so whether you should focus on changing family culture versus the norms say of society or the culture of society i mean they they kind of go together so i think it's what what you're trying to incentivize or to change and how you would target it and it may not be by trying to show oh you should have a different norm or that your social norms are bad but by maybe in the economic changes that incentivize the social norms although there's evidence for example there's two papers that explore soap operas and the penetration of cable tv one in brazil for the soap operas cable tv in the context of india and they show for the cable for the soap operas they depicted families that were much smaller in size than the traditional families that these people actually had and what they show using variation in the cable tv's ability to penetrate that area so actually receive the signal they show that that seems to have changed uh people's perception people's uh fertility outcomes so people ended up having fewer kids in those areas where you they watched women having maybe zero kids or one kid in the soap opera and and then for the cable tv they also found changes in women's um for cable tv in india they found you know changes in people's ideas of what women's roles are and also the amount of agency that women had so particularly how much they were allowed to go outside on their own uh unaccompanied and things like that uh let me turn it over to Belinda okay then uh i have to bring this to an end we'll be a little bit late but i'll ask you for another round of applause for us