HB Ch: Bisin & Verdier (2011)

Chapter 9 in the Handbook of Social Economics (vol 1A) from 2011.
== Summary ==
=== 1. Introduction ===
* Definition of culture
* Pervasive evidence on the resilience of ethnic and religious traits across generations motivates a large fraction of the empirical and theoretical literature on cultural transmission.
* This article concentrates on the intergenerational transmission of culture. [more on conceptualization of this, making culture endogenous and the issue of 'choosing' your 'preferences'.
* In a series of papers, Bisin and Verdier introduce a friction in parental altruism which they call imperfect empathy: while parents are altruistic towards their children, they evaluate choices that affect children using their own (not the child's) preferences. 
* This article reviews the main contributions of models of cultural transmission, from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It presents their implications regarding the long-run population dynamics of cultural traits, and discusses the links between the economic and other approaches to cultural evolution in the social sciences as well as in evolutionary biology. Furthermore, it discusses how to extend the economic theory of cultural transmission to the analysis of several important aspects of the dynamics and propagation of beliefs and values.
=== 2. Theoretical Studies ===