We analyse the role of culture in economic freedom reform and dispersion in an unbalanced panel of up to 80 countries, and in dyadic models with up to 3,003 unique country pairs. We find that a sense of individualism strengthens the effectiveness of democracy in promoting economic freedom within countries over 1950–2015, and that institutional distance between countries increases in their cultural distance, suggesting an important role of culture in determining long-run institutional equilibria. Our results are robust to a large variety of socio-economic controls, measures of institutions and measures of bilateral geographic, economic and demographic distances.

中文翻译：

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经济自由改革：文化重要吗？

我们在多达 80 个国家的不平衡面板以及多达 3,003 个独特国家对的二元模型中分析了文化在经济自由改革和分散中的作用。我们发现，在 1950-2015 年期间，个人主义意识增强了民主在促进国家经济自由方面的有效性，并且国家之间的制度距离随着文化距离的增加而增加，这表明文化在确定长期制度平衡中的重要作用。我们的结果对于各种社会经济控制、制度措施以及双边地理、经济和人口距离的措施都是稳健的。