Cultural proximity: A source of trade flow resilience?

A trade-off between agility and resilience

In many natural or artificial settings, agility and resilience are contradictory properties of agents and populations. The settings one can imagine for this contradiction include very different objects such as computer software (agile code is small, runs fast but is more vulnerable to attacks and failures, while resilient code can be bulky and run slowly but has built-in redundancy and robustne...

Cultural Proximity and Loan Outcomes∗

We present evidence that cultural proximity (shared codes, beliefs, ethnicity) between lenders and borrowers increases the quantity of credit and reduces default. We identify in-group lending using dyadic data on religion and caste for officers and borrowers from an Indian bank, and a rotation policy that induces exogenous matching between them. Having an in-group officer increases credit acces...

Running Head: Cultural Resilience in Aboriginal Communities Identity Formation and Cultural Resilience in Aboriginal Communities

The Evolution of Cultural Resilience and Complexity

The study of memetics has thus far mostly applied a reductionist view of genetics to describe the pathogenic infectivity and transmission dynamics of ideas/memes. In this position paper, we take a first look at some of the distinctive attributes of cultural evolution through the lens of complexity science and theoretical biology. The article comments briefly on connections between memetics and ...

Geographic Proximity, Trade and International Conflict/Cooperation

Geographic Proximity, Trade and International Conflict/Cooperation This paper examines the interactive effect of distance and trade on international conflict and cooperation. The effect of geographic distance depends on trade, while the effect of trade varies with geographic distance. Trade reduces conflict to a greater extent when dyads are geographically close, but has a greater effect on coo...