On 9 November 2026 LEAP co-hosts a one-day workshop on culture and economic policy at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS).
Policies that work in one place often do less, or something different, in another. A growing literature in development economics traces part of the difference to culture: to the norms and beliefs a policy meets when it arrives. Policies in turn reshape those norms. The workshop brings together economists and economic historians who study both directions of this relationship.
Sara Lowes of the University of California, San Diego, opens the day with a keynote, Culture at a Crossroads, drawing on her work with Natalie Bau and Eduardo Montero on culture, policy and economic development. Nine papers follow in four sessions:
- Geography, belief and social order: how the permeability of bedrock shaped human societies, and how beliefs about ancestors sustain high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa
- Identity, ethnicity and political voice: Bible translations and the origins of ethnic identity in Africa, the political legacy of women in the Italian Resistance, and why social classes diverge over trade policy
- Cultural change and persistence: the changing values of non-European migrants in Sweden, and chiefs’ authority over assets in rural Malawi
- Law, taxation and the legitimacy of the state: kinship intensity and state legitimacy, and illegitimate taxation in 40,000 colonial documents
LEAP’s Etienne Le Rossignol wrote the bedrock paper with Joseph Enguehard of the Université libre de Bruxelles.
The day ends at 18:00 with the eleventh LEAP Lecture, delivered by Warren Whatley of the University of Michigan. The workshop opens a series of events at STIAS: a two-day PhD workshop and a one-day workshop on AI and economic policy follow it.
