Events

Professor Jonathan Weigel
Assistant Professor of Business and Public Policy
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business

Abstract

Liberal thinkers argue that the expansion of markets promoted trust, tolerance, and cooperation, while according to more critical schools of thought, markets ushered in a more self-interested, secular, and unsatisfied homo economicus. We examine these ideas in a field experiment in which rural Congolese households were provided with subsidized transportation to the largest market in the provincial capital city one day per week for six months. Access to the market eroded religious values and led participants to place more value on income, education, saving, and productivity. Participants attributed less agency to the divine and more to themselves and to the role of luck. Although access to the market increased household income by 15% eight months after the intervention, it also increased how much money they thought they needed to be happy and left them feeling further from this goal.