Cultural Capital and Access to Opportunity in India

About this event

Cultural capital -- specific human capital that allows individuals access to opportunity in stratified societies -- 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. We use 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. We find that individuals living in communities with culturally distant dominant groups experience large reductions in educational attainment, anthropometric outcomes, consumption and income per capita.