The Dynamics of Inequality, Minorities and School Choice

摘要: The achievement of social norms, cultural paradigms, religious beliefs and moral customs is crucial in the characterization of societies. Anthropologists, sociologists and economists have long been interested in explaining the success of certain groups and the disappearance of others during their intergenerational evolution. From an anthropological and sociobiological point of view this topic has been studied in the seminal works of Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman (1981) and Boyd and Richerson (1985). In the field of economics, the process of intergenerational transmission has been motivated by the evidence of the persistence of cultural diversity reported by Borjas (1995). Moreover, it has been theoretically modeled by Bisin and Verdier (1998, 2001) with a powerful framework that has been applied in different contexts. These class of economic models are able to explain the phenomena in which cultural diversity is observed in the long-run as a consequence of the assumption that parents always socialize their children to their own variant because they believe cultural traits and values have important implication for their offsprings’ future well-being.