GAČR: The Economics of Institutions and Culture

This research project, funded by GA ČR and carried out between 2019 and 2023, investigated the role of cultural factors for how the market economy works, but also what the consequences of markets are for important cultural outcomes. The unifying approach across the project was the economics of institutions and culture, a field concerned with the socioeconomic significance of values, attitudes, and beliefs. There was a particular focus on cultural factors relevant to how immigrants to Europe fare and to their prospects for integration.

The project produced ten articles in international journals, together with a book chapter published by Springer. A methodological priority ran through much of this work: the effort to establish credible causal relationships rather than mere correlations. Four studies employed the epidemiological method, which examines the descendants of immigrants in order to isolate the influence of inherited culture while ruling out reverse causality, and one relied on a field experiment.

Three publications illustrate the range of the findings.
The first, “Intolerance Predicts Climate Skepticism” (published in Energy Economics), broke new ground by introducing intolerance as a cultural predictor of attitudes toward climate change. The study found that intolerance embedded in the background culture of immigrants bears a robust relationship to climate skepticism. One implication is that persuading climate skeptics may require attention to deeper personal dispositions rather than factual argument alone.

The second, “Religiosity and Discrimination against Same-Sex Couples: The Case of Portugal’s Rental Market” (published in the Journal of Housing Economics), examined how same-sex couples were treated when seeking to rent an apartment. Male same-sex couples proved substantially less likely to receive a positive reply, by roughly 7 to 8 percentage points, or 23 to 26 percent, than opposite-sex couples. This disadvantage diminished in more religious parishes. The study brought the literature into a southern European, Catholic context and considered the role of religion for the first time.

The third, “Economic Freedom and Antisemitism” (published in the Journal of Institutional Economics) asked whether features of the market economy shape attitudes toward Jews, a question not previously examined despite the frequently economic framing of antisemitic sentiment. Greater economic openness was associated with more antisemitism, while a stronger rule of law was associated with less. The results suggest that financial deregulation may carry cultural costs that a firm legal order can help to offset.

These studies deepen our understanding of how cultural characteristics form and what they mean for contemporary European societies. The findings carry weight for both scholarship and policy, offering evidence on questions of tolerance, discrimination, and integration.