Abstract

Abstract How much do cultural biases affect economic exchange? We try to answer this question by using the relative trust European citizens have for citizens of other countries. First, we document that this trust is affected not only by objective characteristics of the country being trusted, but also by cultural aspects such as religion, a history of conflicts, and genetic similarities. We then find that lower relative levels of trust toward citizens of a country lead to less trade with that country, less portfolio investment, and less direct investment in that country, even after controlling for the objective characteristics of that country. This effect is stronger for good that are more trust intensive and doubles or triples when trust is instrumented with its cultural determinants. We conclude that perceptions rooted in culture are important (and generally omitted) determinants of economic exchange. * We would like to thank Giuseppe Nicoletti for providing the OECD dataset, Michele Gambera for providing the Morningstar portfolio data, and Roc Armenter for excellent research assistantship. We also thank Franklin Allen, Marianne Baxter, Patricia Ledesma, Mitchell Petersen, Andrei Shleifer, Rene Stulz, and Samuel Thompson for very helpful comments. We benefited from the comments of participants to seminars at the European University Institute, Wharton, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin, NBER Corporate Finance, International Trade, and Behavioral Meetings. Luigi Guiso acknowledges financial support from MURST, and the EEC. Paola Sapienza acknowledges financial support from the Center for International Economics and Development at Northwestern University. Luigi Zingales acknowledges financial support from the Center for Research on Security Prices and the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago. We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be detested in France. Duke of Wellington The Webster dictionary defines culture as "the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group." In this paper we focus on the first dimension of culture (i.e., customary beliefs) and we ask how these customary beliefs (as those expressed by the Duke of Wellington) impact economic choices. In doing so we face both a theoretical and an empirical challenge. From the theoretical point of view, we need to explain how these customary beliefs may enter into the standard economic model. Since Muth (1960Muth ( , 1961 and Lucas (1976) nearly all research in economics has endogenized beliefs, under the rational expectations assumption that subjective and objective beliefs coincide. But the assumption that agents share common prior beliefs (necessary for rational expectations) is increasingly under attack. The common-prior assumption is quite restrictive and does not allow agents to "agree to disagree" (Aumann (1976)). Perfectly rational people might have different priors. In fact, the common use of the word rational only requires beliefs to be Bayesian. But the Bayesian paradigm does not address the question of the rationality of prior beliefs In particular, we focus on the effect that customary beliefs have on international trade and investments via the effect they have on the degree of trust citizens of a country have toward citizens of other countries. In a world where contract enforcement is imperfect and/or where it is impossible or prohibitively expensive to write all future contingencies into contracts, the degree of mutual trust is an essential component in any economic exchange. Lack of trust will prevent otherwise profitable trade and investment opportunities. In relational contracts what matters is personalized trust, the mutual trust people developed through repeated interactions (Grief, 1993 seems to suggest). These facts are not peculiar to this dataset. As we will show, they are exactly replicated in an independent and broader survey (Eurobarometer). Hence, we will use the idiosyncratic component of trust in this larger dataset as a proxy for the "customary beliefs." Even this measure of "customary beliefs" , however, could be contaminated by other factors. For example, the average Canadian has more information about Americans than the average Japanese and this better information can significantly affect (upward or downward) her degree of trust. Hence, the second step in our procedure is to regress the residual trust on a series of variables that proxy for difference in information and another set that proxy for culture. As measures of information we use the geographical distance between the two countries, their proximity, and the commonality between the two languages. 3 We also collected the number of times a country name appears in the headlines of the major newspaper in each country, as a measure of the degree of information this country has. These variables seem to have limited power to explain why some countries trust others more. If anything better newspapers' coverage leads to less trust. A variable that could proxy both for information and for culture is the commonality in the legal systems. We find that citizens from a country trust more citizens from another when the two countries share the same type of legal system (i.e., both have a civil code or both a common law system). But we also find more convincing evidence of the effect of cultural stereotypes on trust. For example, we know that people with similar cultural backgrounds and similar appearances tend to trust each other more (McPherson et al. 2001). As a measure of similarity in culture that is unrelated to better objective reasons to trust we use commonality of religion. As a measure of somatic similarities, we use the genetic distance between indigenous populations, as computed by Cavalli Sforza et al. (1993). While genetic distance does not necessarily express itself in somatic differences, it does represent the evolutionary distance between two populations. We find that both these variables are important in explaining trust, not only from a statistical point of view, but also from an economic one. Commonality of religion has a positive impact and its effect is important: compared to a case where religion is not shared, a match where 90 3 In fact, the commonality between the two languages is also a proxy for a common culture. Thus, by attributing all its effect to information we are biasing our results against finding any effect of culture. 3 percent of the citizens share the same religion (e.g. Italy and Spain) raises trust by 6 percent of its sample mean. Citizens of a country also tend to trust more citizens of countries that are genetically closer. One standard deviation increase in genetic distance lowers bilateral trust by 6 percent of the sample mean. To capture the implicit positive or negative bias against other nations present in a country's cultural tradition, we also use its history of wars. People's priors can be affected by their education and in particular by the history they study in school. Italian education, for instance, emphasizes the struggles that lead to the reunification of the country in the 19th century. Since the major battles during this period have been fought against Austria, Italian students may develop, as our data show, a negative image of Austrians. These findings are consistent with Bornhorst et al (2004), who find that cultural stereotypes affect the level of trust in an experimental setting. Having established an effect of "culture" on priors, we then use these cultural variables as instruments to show how culture affects economic exchange between two countries through its impact on trust. We find that a higher level of relative trust can explain cross country trade beyond what extended gravity models can account for. At sample means, a one standard deviation increase in the trust of the importer toward the exporter raises exports by 32 percent. To gain more confidence on the causal nature of this result, we investigate whether the magnitude of this effect changes as theory predicts. If trust is an important component in the decision to buy a foreign good, it should matter the most for sophisticated goods, which greatly differ on quality. For this reason, we split the sample according to Rauch (1999) goods classification. Consistent with trust causing trade, the effect is much stronger for differentiated goods than for commodities. That culture affects trust and, through it, trade does not necessarily imply that culture affects it through its impact on people's prior. An alternative interpretation is that it works through preferences. If, for cultural reasons, British derive a special pleasure from hurting French, it is rational for the French to mistrust them. This cultural bias would lead to lower trust and lower trade. If this were the case, however, the more information a French has about British, the less he will trust them. By contrast, if culture works through priors, the more information, the less its role in affecting trade should be. Consistent with our hypothesis that culture works through people's priors, we find that the effect of trust is reduced if a country is 4 more exposed to the news of another country. We also show that the degree of relative trust affects the pattern of international diversification. Portfolio investments are heavily tilted toward countries whose citizens are considered relatively more trustworthy: one-standard deviation increase in trust doubles the average share of investment in a country. We find the same results when we analyze the pattern of foreign direct investments. A country is more willing to make foreign direct investment in a country whose citizens it trusts more. Hence, the correlation between trust and economic exchange seems to be both economically important and pervasive. We then instrument trust with its cultural components (the history of wars, and the commonality in religion and in ethnic origin), which are also the drivers of stereotypes. Since these factors are unlikely to have been driven by recent trade or investment flows, we can exclude the reverse causality question. In fact, to be sure, we drop the wars during the last 200 years, the ones that are more likely to have affected today's trade patterns, and find even stronger effects. Our IV estimates are between two and three times larger than our OLS one. Hence, not only trust is an important factor in determining the pattern of economic exchange, but its cultural component seems to be particularly important. While several papers have tried to explain the average level of trust in a country (e.g., la In our attempt to explain several international exchange puzzles, our paper is similar to Portes and Rey (2002). As a key determinant, however, they do not consider trust, but differences in information, which they measure as telephone traffic between two countries and as number of local branches of foreign banks. Our paper is also related to Morse and Shive (2004), Cohen (2004), De Groot et al. (2003 and Vachlos (2004). Morse and Shive (2004) relate portfolio choices to the degree of patriotism of a country. Cohen (2004) shows that employees' bias toward investing in their own company is not due to information, but to some form of loyalty toward their company. Both these papers, thus, illustrate one specific dimension in which cul-5 tural biases can affect economic choices. Our paper uses a broader definition of cultural bias and tries to show the pervasiveness of its effects. On the other hand, De Groot et al.(2003) and Vachlos (2004) study the effect of institutional quality and regulatory homogeneity on international exchange. While their findings can be explained in term of similar cultures breeding higher trust, they are also consistent with other, more traditional explanations (information, ease of access to legal remedies, etc.). We go beyond these results and show that trust matters even after we account for these institutional similarities. Finally, our paper can be seen as a generalization of Rauch and Trindade (2002). They find that the percentage of ethnic Chinese in a country help predicts the level of trade beyond the standard specification. We show this result is not specific to ethnic networks. Any cultural barrier (or lack of thereof) significantly impacts trade and investments. The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. Section I presents a very simple model of the reason why trust might be so important. Section II introduces our data and shows that 40% of the variation in trust is not due to objective characteristics, but to idiosyncratic opinions. Section III relates relative trust to information and cultural variables. Section IV studies the effect of relative trust on trade, Section V on portfolio investments, and Section VI on foreign direct investments. Finally, Section VII concludes. I Theoretical Framework How does trust enter economic decisions? One way to model trust is as degree of precision. In assessing their opportunities to trade and invest economic agents make some estimates on the value of these opportunities. The higher the trust on the counterpart, the better the precision of the estimate is. In such a case, the role played by trust would be second order: except for very high level of risk aversion, trust modelled in this way is bound to have very little impact on decisions. Alternatively, trust (or at least the cultural component of trust) can be modelled as a prior affecting people's decisions. To see how trust can have a first order effect through this channel we present an extremely simple model, based on a variation of Anderlini and Felli (2002). Consider two parties, A and B, who can engage in some profitable trade. Let assume that A has to spend a cost c to find out whether the total value created by this trade opportunity is V h > 0 (with probability p) or V l < 0 (with probability 1 − p). After the cost c is paid, 6 the value V i becomes known (to both parties) with certainty. Thus, if the value is found to be V l < 0, the trade opportunity will not be pursued. If both parties behave properly, the value created by this opportunity is equally split between them. There is, however, the possibility that B behaves opportunistically (Williamson (1985) would say with guile) and succeeds in appropriating the whole surplus. For example, early investors in Russia, such as Kenneth Dart, experienced at their own expenses the creativity of local managers in expropriating shareholders. One example was the organization of a shareholder meeting in a small town in the middle of Siberia after all the air tickets to that destination had been purchased. Another example is the aggressive use of reverse stock splits (when all Yukos capital got consolidated into 10 shares) to squeeze out minority investors. Note that both these tricks are technically legal, thus a good legal system might be insufficient in protecting against these extreme forms of opportunism. We assume that A attributes probability π to this set of events. For simplicity, we ignore the similar problem faced by B. Then, the ex ante payoff of A is Of course, A will pay the investigation cost c and exploit the opportunity (when profitable) if and only if A good example of Proposition 1 is provided by the unrealized meeting between Steve Jobs and IBM. According to Steve Job memoirs, when in 1980 IBM was desperately looking for an operating system for PCs, it looked at Apple and invited him to a meeting. Steve Jobs, fearing that IBM would extract all the surplus from any possible negotiation, declined to go and, in so doing, missed the opportunity to become a Microsoft. 4 Hence, lack of trust may lead to first order losses. Thus far, we have only shown that if A expects to be taken advantage of by B with high probability is unlikely to enter any economic transaction with B. The relevant question, then, 4 We thank Luca Anderlini for suggesting this example. 7 is how A will form an expectation about this probability π. Note that the event "being taken advantage of" is not an easy one to document. If B takes advantage of her superior knowledge of her country legal code to "trick" A and appropriate all the surplus, this event will not appear in the official statistics as a crime, not even as a contractual violation. Hence, A will be forced to use a generic prior on the trustworthiness of citizens of country B, which he is going to update with his personal experience. We assume that people use their (possibly updated) priors in answering the Eurobarometer question on trust. The question, then, is how do people form their priors. In GSZ Note that none of these forces is properly "economic" in its nature. Hence, there is no reason to assume that these priors are necessarily unbiased. Take for example, the above-mentioned case of Italian historical education. The purpose of the teaching is to breed a sense of national identity. The Austrians are simply the necessary villain. Hence, the dislike toward Austrians is not the calculated result of a policy, but its undesired side effect: there are no heroes without villains. In other cases, the bias might be the real goal of a political maneuver (Glaeser, 2003). In both cases, however, the cultural forces that shape the formation of priors introduce a bias. In this paper, we will try to estimate the importance of this cultural bias in trust and its effects on economic exchange. Note also that our beliefs are perfectly rational, in the common use of the word rational, which requires beliefs to be Bayesian. In fact, the Bayesian paradigm does not deal with the process of belief formation and does not address the question of the rationality of beliefs (Gilboa, Postlewaite, and Schmeidler, 2004). Finally, negative priors are unlikely to be corrected fast. If (1) is negative, A will never try to trade with B and hence will never collect enough data to overturn her prior. In fact, equation (1) provides a simple rationale for why it pays to build trust through team work or through trust-building exercises. If two people are put in the condition to interact when c is zero or they are forced to interact (under the threat of being fired) in situations where (1) is negative, they will start collecting data on the trustworthiness of their partners and possibly overcome some biased negative prior. They then will carry and apply this knowledge in future voluntary 8 interactions. In sum, the message of this extremely simple model is that lack of trust, which can be rooted more in cultural traditions than in reality, can cause first order economic losses and, furthermore, is likely to persist over time. II Bilateral trust A Measuring trust We obtain our measures of trust from a set of surveys conducted by Eurobarometer and spon- One distinct and unique feature of these surveys is that respondents have been asked to report how much they trust their fellow citizens and how much they trust the citizens of each of the countries belonging to the European Union. More specifically, they have been asked the following question: "I would like to ask you a question about how much trust you have in people from various countries. For each, please tell me whether you have a lot of trust, some trust, not very much trust or no trust at all". In some of the surveys this same question was also asked with reference to citizens of a number of non EU countries, which include the United States, Russia, Switzerland, China, Japan, Turkey, and some Eastern and Central European countries (Bulgaria, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Czech Republic). As in every survey, there may be some doubts about the way people interpret the question. First, there is some ambiguity on how to interpret the answer. In a trust game, the level of trust maps into the amount of money you are willing to put at risk. Here, this mapping is missing. Second, we are concerned whether a high level of trust reflects a high trust in a generic citizen 9 of a different country or a better ability to identify the trustworthy people in a different country, which translates into a higher willingness to trust them. To address these doubts in a separate survey we asked a sample of 1,990 individuals both this question and the two following others: 1) " Suppose that a random person you do not know personally receives by mistake a sum of 1000 euros that belong to you. He or she is aware that the money belongs to you and knows your name and address. He or she can keep the money without incurring in any punishment. According to you what is the probability (number between zero and 100) that he or she returns the money?" 2) "How good are you (4 categories) in detecting people who are trustworthy?"(Guiso et al. For our purposes, we have first re-coded the answers to the trust question setting them =1 ( no trust at all), = 2 (not very much trust), =3 (some trust), =4 (a lot of trust). We have then aggregated responses by country and year computing the mean value of the responses to each survey. The result is a rectangular matrix of trust from European countries to European and non European countries which varies over time and in size. Obviously, for the EU countries the matrix is symmetric in each given sample year. Finally, it is clear that there are systematic differences in how much a given country trusts and how much is trusted by others (see the last row and last column of For instance, the Portuguese are those who trust the least (only 10 percent report that they trust a lot on average) and the Swedish those who trust the most (40 percent report they trust others a lot on average); furthermore, the Turkish are the least trusted (6 percent trust them fully on average) and citizens of Switzerland the most (29 percent trust them fully on average). Obviously, these "country of origin" and "country of destination" effects may easily reflect systematic features of the country that trusts or is trusted. If all (or almost all) the variation in the data were explained by the attitude citizens of a country have to trust (being trusted), there would be little hope for relative trust to be able to affect the patterns of bilateral trade. However, country of origin effects and country of destination effects leave al lot of variation unexplained. This effect is visible in In Characteristics of the country expressing and receiving trust can (controlling for time variation) at most explain between 44 and 64% of the variability in trust depending on how the aggregate trust of a country's citizens is computed. There remains a considerable portion of the 11 trust to citizens of a country that cannot be explained by characteristics of either one of the two countries. III What explains relative trust? The amount of trust a citizen of a country has towards his fellow citizens and the citizens of other countries will in general depend on general "objective" features of the country that gives and the country that receives trust as well as by some "subjective" view that are specific to the country pair. In order to capture "objective" determinants of trust we include a full set of country of origin (the country that expresses trust) and country of destination (the country that receives trust) fixed effects as already done in By controlling for fixed effects of origin and destination in trust, we are left with the relative trust. Relative trust among each pair of countries will be affected by match-specific variables that impinge on the view that the citizens of the two countries have of each other. In particular, a citizen's prior about the reliability of another country citizen could reflect both specific information and cultural "stereotypes" assimilated at school or informally through word-of-mouth in society. A Proxies for information As measures of information we use the geographical distance between the two countries, their proximity, and the commonality between the two languages. The geographical distance between two countries is the log of distance in kilometers between the major cities (usually the capital) of the respective countries. 5 We also add a dummy variable to indicate when two countries share a common land border 12 the products of the percentage of people who speak the same language in each pair of countries, summed across all primary languages spoken in those two countries. 6 To measure the level of information citizens of one country have of citizens of other countries we follow Rey and Portes (2002) and collect the number of times a country name appears in the headlines of a major newspaper in another country. For each country we searched the most diffused newspaper present in Factiva. For each pair of country i and j we recorded the number of articles in the newspaper of country i that mentioned country j or citizens of country j in the headline. We divided this number by the number of total news on foreign countries. In addition to these measures we use La B Proxies for cultural stereotypes We measure cultural stereotypes with three variables, the history of wars between two countries in the last millennia, the commonality in religion, and the similarity in ethnic origin. The first measure is the number of years a country pair has been engaged in a war since the end of the first millennium until 1970, where we use today's borders to decide whether a country was engaged in a war against another. Precisely, we construct two measures. The first one measures the number of years at war between each pair of countries from 1000 till 1815 (Congress of Vienna) and the second one measures the same variable for the period 1815-1970. Presumably, countries that have a long history of wars and conflict will mistrust each other. For 6 See Boisso and Ferrantino (1997). We use as alternative an indicator variable equal to one if the pair of countries share an official language. This variable is from Jon Haveman's website: http://www.macalester.edu/research/economics/PAGE/HAVEMAN/Trade.Resources/TradeData.html. The results remain substantially unchanged. 7 See Cornell and Welch (1996) 13 instance, the clear tendency of the French to trust the British less than any other country, as Interestingly, cultural formation at school not only is a vehicle for prolonging the memory of facts that took place many years ago (this is why we count wars over almost a millennium), but it also shapes a citizen opinion and contribute to today's stereotypes. Furthermore, historical facts are interpreted with the lenses of the currently ruling group (and this is why we reconstruct wars using today's borders). 8 . The second measure of cultural biases is an indicator of religious similarity equal to the empirical probability that two randomly chosen individuals in two countries will share the same religion. We obtain this measure by taking the product of the fraction of individuals in country j and in country i that have religion k and then summing across k (k = Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Orthodox, no-religion, other affiliation). To calculate this variable we use the percentage of religious and non-religious people belonging to each country from the WVS. Our third measure is the commonality in ethnic origin. To measure this last variable we use the genetic distance between indigenous population as developed by Cavalli-Sforza et. al.(1996). 9 This measure is based on the existence of genetic or DNA polymorphism (a situation in which a gene or a DNA sequence exist in at least two different forms (alleles)). A simple example of polymorphism is the ABO blood groups classification which was discovered at the beginning of last century. While ABO alleles are present in all population, the frequency of each allele varies a lot across populations. For example, the O allele is frequent in 61 percent of African population and 98 percent in American Natives populations. These differences in alleles hold true for other genes or DNA sequences, as well. As a first approximation, Cavalli-Sforza measure of genetic distance sums the differences in frequencies of these polymorphisms to derive a measure of how different the genetic composition of two population is. We use genetic distance because it correlates with anthropometric traits (Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1996) and 14 already recognized by Aristotle. In our sample we can see that this love for similar translates into higher levels of trust: in almost all the countries people trust much more a generic fellow citizen than a generic citizen of any other country. The only exceptions are Scandinavian countries were sometimes they trust countrymen from another Scandinavian country than a fellow citizen. Summary statistics on these variables and trust are reported in