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In the last 60 years, the results of development aid have been mixed. Thus far, it has been mostly the aid recipient countries, which have been held responsible for aid's shortcomings. That focus is misplaced, however, since the donor countries, through development aid, also export some of their own institutions and values to the recipient countries affecting the recipients' rate of entrepreneurship and income. This study demonstrates how donor countries vary widely in both the type and quality of their institutions and values, leading to diverging economic outcomes. The results indicate that recipient countries should pay serious attention to who their development partner is. In particular, recipients would want to avoid aid from low institutional quality donors with perceived anti-market attitudes. Finally, it is argued that development aid might become more efficient if it moved away from the bilateral, towards the multilateral, mode.

Since the 1990s, gender quotas have been celebrated for improving women’s equality. Yet their cross-national and longitudinal impact on attitudes toward female politicians and the mechanism through which this process occurs are not well understood. Using multilevel modeling on 87 nations, we examine how different types of quotas, with varied features and levels of strength, shape beliefs about women in politics. We give particular attention to the mechanism of visibility created by quotas in impacting attitudes. Results suggest that unlike quotas with features facilitating low visibility (i.e., weak quotas), those producing high visibility (i.e., robust quotas) significantly impact public approval of women in politics. However, the direction of this effect varies by quota type. Social context also matters. Robust quota effects—both positive and negative—are especially pronounced in democracies but are insignificant in nondemocracies. Limited differences by gender (men versus women) emerge. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

This study explores whether the diffusion of gender-equitable attitudes towards female employment is associated with fertility. We argue that any positive effect on fertility requires not only high levels of gender-equitable attitudes overall, but also attitude convergence between men and women. We analyse 27 countries using data from the World Values Surveys and European Values Studies. We find support for a U-shaped relationship between changes in gender role attitudes and fertility: an initial drop in fertility is observed as countries move from a traditional to a more gender-symmetric model. Beyond a certain threshold, additional increases in gender egalitarianism become positively associated with fertility. This curvi-linear relationship is moderated by the difference in attitudes between men and women: when there is more agreement, changes are more rapid and the effect of gender egalitarian attitudes on fertility strengthens.

Researchers investigating the relationship between age and life satisfaction have produced conflicting answers, via disputes over whether to include individual-level control variables in regression models. Most scholars believe there is a ‘U-shaped’ relationship, with life satisfaction falling towards middle age and subsequently rising. This position emerges mainly in research that uses control variables (for example, for income and marital status). This approach is incorrect. Regression models should control only ‘confounding’ variables; that is, variables that are causally prior to the dependent variable and the core independent variable of interest. Other individual-level variables cannot determine one’s age; they are not confounders and should not be controlled. This article applies these points to data from the World Values Survey. A key finding is that there is at best a negligible post-middle-age rise in life satisfaction – and the important implication is that there cannot then be a U-shaped relationship between age and life satisfaction.

Targeted transfer programs for poor citizens have become increasingly common in the developing world. Yet, a common concern among policy-makers and citizens is that such programs tend to discourage work. We re-analyze the data from seven randomized controlled trials of government-run cash transfer programs in six developing countries throughout the world, and find no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.

The collection of data on values through instruments such as the World Values Survey has focused attention on two opposing but inter-related trends, namely the combination of substantial cultural change in many countries and the persistence of distinctive traditional values. This reflects the interplay between social changes associated with modernisation and globalisation—including increased global trade and the rise of global popular culture—with traditional values country-specific systems. In this paper, we introduce a focus on another potentially important source of change, that of widening higher education participation and attainment, and the extent to which self-reported values differ between university graduates and non-graduates. We investigated this question using data from the most recent collection of the World Values Survey (2017–2020) for six core values—family, friends, leisure, work, politics, and religion—and tested for the influence of higher education attainment on the perceived “importance” of each value and the extent to which this influence differs across values and in gender, generation and country grouping sub-samples. We find evidence for consistent effects in most contexts, with no statistical differences between graduates on non-graduates in relation to the propensity to view family and work as important, statistically significant positive effects on the propensity of graduates to view friends, leisure, and politics as important, and a significant negative effect in relation to religion.

In this paper, we examine the relationships between three of the Big 5 personality traits (conscientiousness, openness to experience, and agreeableness) and willingness to justify unethical behavior. We also consider the moderating relationship of four of the GLOBE cultural dimensions (institutional collectivism, humane orientation, performance orientation, and assertiveness) on the above relationship. We tested our propositions on a sample of 38,655 individuals from 23 different countries obtained from the latest data available from the World Values Survey Group's survey (WVS 2014). We found that conscientiousness and agreeableness were both negatively associated with willingness to justify unethical behavior. We also conducted Hierarchical Linear Modeling and found significant interaction effects of selected GLOBE cultural dimensions (humane orientation, assertiveness, institutional collectivism, and performance orientation) on the relationships between personality traits and willingness to justify unethical behavior. We provide managerial implications of our findings, as well as suggestions for future research.

While quality of life (QOL) is the result of satisfying human needs, our current provision strategies result in global environmental degradation. To ensure sustainable QOL, we need to understand the environmental impact of human needs satisfaction. In this paper we deconstruct QOL, and apply the fundamental human needs framework developed by Max-Neef et al to calculate the carbon and energy footprints of subsistence, protection, creation, freedom, leisure, identity, understanding and participation. We find that half of global carbon emissions are driven by subsistence and protection. A similar amount are due to freedom, identity, creation and leisure together, whereas understanding and participation jointly account for less than 4% of global emissions. We use 35 objective and subjective indicators to evaluate human needs satisfaction and their associated carbon footprints across nations. We find that the relationship between QOL and environmental impact is more complex than previously identified through aggregated or single indicators. Satisfying needs such as protection, identity and leisure is generally not correlated with their corresponding footprints. In contrast, the likelihood of satisfying needs for understanding, creation, participation and freedom, increases steeply when moving from low to moderate emissions, and then stagnates. Most objective indicators show a threshold trend with respect to footprints, but most subjective indicators show no relationship, except for freedom and creation. Our study signals the importance of considering both subjective and objective satisfaction to assess QOL-impact relationships at the needs level. In this way, resources could be strategically invested where they strongly relate to social outcomes, and spared where non-consumption satisfiers could be more effective. Through this approach, decoupling human needs satisfaction from environmental damage becomes more attainable.

Although most surveys of happiness and general life satisfaction find only small differences between men and women, women report slightly higher subjective well-being than men in some countries, and slightly lower subjective well-being in others. The present study investigates the social and cultural conditions that favor higher female relative to male happiness and life satisfaction. Results from more than 90 countries represented in the World Values Survey show that conditions associated with a high level of female relative to male happiness and life satisfaction include a high proportion of Muslims in the country, a low proportion of Catholics, and absence of communist history. Among indicators of gender equality, a low rate of female non-agricultural employment is associated with higher female-versus-male happiness and satisfaction. Differences in the rate of female non-agricultural employment explain part of the effects of communist history and prevailing religion. They may also explain the recent observation of declining female life satisfaction in the United States.

We develop a theory of parent-child relations that rationalizes the choice between alternative parenting styles (as set out in Baumrind (1967)). Parents maximize an objective function that combines Beckerian altruism and paternalism towards children. They can affect their children's choices via two channels: either by influencing children's preferences or by imposing direct restrictions on their choice sets. Different parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive) emerge as equilibrium outcomes and are affected both by parental preferences and by the socioeconomic environment. Parenting style, in turn, feeds back into the children's welfare and economic success. The theory is consistent with the decline of authoritarian parenting observed in industrialized countries and with the greater prevalence of more permissive parenting in countries characterized by low inequality.