Cultural capital and access to opportunity in India

This seminar will host a discussion with Sam Asher about Cultural capital - specific human capital that allows individuals access to opportunity in stratified societies - which has long been a major field of research in sociology. 

Economics has been slow to study this concept in part because of the difficulty in measuring cultural capital and in finding suitable empirical settings to study its effects. Leveraging novel data on historical social norms of each one of India's 4,635 ethnic groups (castes, tribes, etc), we generate a new measure of cultural capital by calculating the cultural distance between each of India communities and the economically dominant group in every village, whose control of land gives them significant power over their neighbour’s economic, social, and political lives. 

Sam Asher will discuss a difference-in-differences strategy that compares members of the same community experiencing differences in cultural capital due to differences in the dominant community across villages. The research conducted finds that individuals living in communities with culturally distant dominant groups experience large reductions in educational attainment, anthropometric outcomes, consumption and income per capita.

About the speakers

• Sam Asher (Imperial College London Business School)

Online streaming login

• Meeting ID: 904 957 1710 
• Passcode: t9Bkt1rrMc

Image by Pavan Gupta via Unsplash.