Institutional Transplant and Cultural Proximity: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Prussia
利用19世纪普鲁士县级数据，研究发现文化上与法国更接近的地区在拿破仑制度移植后长期经济表现更好，说明文化接近性影响制度采纳效果。
This article presents evidence that cultural proximity between the exporting and the receiving countries positively affects the adoption of new institutions and the resulting long-term economic outcomes. We obtain this result by combining new information on pre-Napoleonic principalities with county-level census data from nineteenth-century Prussia. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment generated by radical Napoleonic institutional reforms and the deeply rooted cultural heterogeneity across Prussian counties. We show that institutional reforms in counties that are culturally more similar to France, in terms of religious affiliation, generate better long-term economic performance.