CEPII, Recherche et Expertise sur l'economie mondiale
The Economic Incentives of Cultural Transmission: Spatial Evidence from Naming Patterns across France


Yann Algan
Thierry Mayer
Mathias Thoenig

 Highlights :

 Abstract :
This paper aims at studying how economic incentives influence cultural transmission. We do so in the context of naming decisions, a crucial expression of cultural identity. Our focus is on Arabic versus Non- Arabic names given by parents to their newborn babies in France over the 2003-2007 period. Our model of cultural transmission disentangles between three determinants: (i) vertical transmission of parental culture; (ii) horizontal influence from the neighborhood; (iii) economic penalty associated with names that sound culturally distinctive. Our identification is based on the sample of households being exogenously allocated across public housings dwellings. We find that economic incentives largely influence naming choices: In the absence of economic penalty, the annual number of babies born with an Arabic name would have been more than 50 percent larger. Our theory-based estimates allow us to perform a welfare analysis where we gauge the strength of cultural attachment in monetary units. We find that the vertical transmission of an Arabic name provides the same shift in parents’ utility as a 3% rise in lifetime income of the child.

 Keywords : Cultural transmission | Choice of first names

 JEL : D10
CEPII Working Paper
N°2013-25, September 2013

Non Technical Summary

Full text

Reference
BibTeX (with abstract),
plain text (with abstract),
RIS (with abstract)

Contact: 
 Fields of expertise

Back