Economics, society, and culture: Empirical measurement of the economic impact of some socio-cultural phenomena

Economic agents---consumers, producers, and government officials---live in society and make decisions in a cultural context. Yet, the economic implications of many socio-cultural phenomena are hard to measure empirically and are typically assumed away in theoretical models. My dissertation develops new methods for quantifying such phenomena, in an attempt to show that they might have measurable economic implications of substantial empirical significance. I demonstrate in three papers how survey data can be used to study phenomena like conspicuous consumption and government corruption. A brief summary of my papers follows.; The first paper, "Conspicuous Consumption and the Visibility of Consumer Expenditures," introduces a new national survey designed to quantify the relative "cultural" visibility of different consumer expenditures among U.S. households. The resulting Visibility Index ( Vindex) is used to assess statements and narratives from the economics literature---from Smith to Marx to Becker---and is applied to demonstrate that a simple "signaling by consuming" model a la Veblen could predict up to 20 percent of the cross-good variation in total expenditure elasticities of demand in certain U.S. populations.; The second paper, "Who Sees What? Demographics and the Visibility of Consumer Expenditures," presents new data from a second wave of said visibility survey, and uses the augmented data set to explore the relationship between respondents' demographic characteristics and the expenditures they perceive as visible. I find substantial variation both across demographic characteristics and across consumption categories in the relation between demographics and expenditure visibility. Furthermore, while my demographic variables have no predictive power for the visibility of some expenditures, for other expenditures there seem to exist "visibility subcultures," with different visibility levels among different demographic groups.; Finally, the paper "Estimating the Costs of Corruption: Evidence from Firms in Peru" offers a new approach for measuring government corruption. By modeling corruption as heterogeneously affecting the production technology of firms and using data from a corruption survey administered in Peru by the World Bank, it presents exploratory evidence suggesting the existence of a large variation in the costs of corruption as forgone revenue at the firm level.