Subject Area

Economics

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to the field of Cultural Economics by exploring the relationship between cultural transmission and economic outcomes. Across three distinct essays, this research investigates how mass media narratives shape economic preferences and labor decisions, and conversely, how economic fundamentals drive the evolution of cultural markers like language.   The first two chapters focus on the cultural and economic impact of television in Latin America, utilizing a novel dataset of telenovelas aired between 1960 and 2024. Chapter 1 extends the analysis of media influence to labor economics, studying the effect of televised female empowerment on female labor market outcomes. By deploying generative AI to construct a Female Empowerment Index (FEI) for Latin American telenovelas, this chapter demonstrates that exposure to empowered female characters during impressionable years significantly increases the likelihood of a female to work. Relying on an instrumental variables strategy based on television signal coverage in Mexico, the causal estimates indicate that changes in the FEI account for a substantial fraction of the aggregate increase in women's labor force participation over the study period, with emotional framing and depicted job types playing a critical role.   Chapter 2 examines how entertainment media shapes political economy by evaluating the effect of telenovelas depicting inequality on public support for redistribution. Utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify inequality-focused narratives, alongside LAPOP fieldwork data, the analysis reveals a consistent 4% reduction in support for redistribution following exposure to these shows. The findings suggest that these narratives misrepresent the severity of real-world inequality, consequently altering viewers' policy priorities.   Chapter 3 shifts the focus to historical and structural cultural economics, revisiting the role of potential inter-ethnic trade in shaping long-run inter-ethnic linguistic differences. Replicating and building upon Dickens (2022), this chapter introduces improved measures of potential inter-ethnic gains from agricultural trade. The results confirm that economic incentives, specifically trade, play a significant role in shaping linguistic proximity, while also highlighting the empirical difficulty of disentangling inter-ethnic from intra-ethnic trade. Furthermore, this chapter contributes a novel open-source computational framework to facilitate original, replicable economic research in this domain.   Together, these three chapters leverage advanced computational methods to demonstrate that cultural factors are deeply embedded in economic life, acting as both powerful catalysts for behavior change and reflections of underlying economic incentives.

Degree Date

Spring 2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Economics

Advisor

Ömer Özak

Second Advisor

Klaus Desmet

Third Advisor

Wookun Kim

Fourth Advisor

Alejandra Ramos

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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