Cultural Doorways in the Barriers to Development

We provide a new measure of cultural similarity among ethnic groups and countries, based on orally transmitted narratives. Compared to other measures of phylogenetic distances of the separation time of two ethnic groups, either linguistic, religious or based on the “molecular clock”, our index measures the intensity of cultural exchanges across group pairs in their history, after separation and before the recent great migrations. By the use of this index, a “cultural clock”, we provide further support to the hypothesis that the cultural channel is key to interpret the role of vertically transmitted traits in the account for the deep causes of observed pairwise distances in economic outcomes, at both the ethnic-group and the country level.