Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? Ultimatum Game Bargaining among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon by Joseph Henrich. Published in volume 90, issue 4, pages 973-979 of American Economic Review, September 2000

This paper examines the impact of cultural diversity on innovation. Focusing on the United States from 1850 to 1940, we develop a novel surname-based measure of cultural diversity and combine this with patent data. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties' surname compositions driven by historical immigration, we find that rising diversity increased both the quantity and quality of innovation within counties and for individual inventors. Examining mechanisms, we provide evidence suggesting that greater surname diversity accelerated innovation both by expanding the range of ideas, skills and perspectives available for recombination and by fostering the diverse social interactions that facilitate idea sharing.

In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies by Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis and Richard McElreath. Published in volume 91, issue 2, pages 73-78 of American Economic Review, May 2001