The paper analyzes key achievements in sociocultural research of economic development for the last twenty years. Firstly, the paper describes the main approaches in sociocultural studies and key trends in empirical research (including causality issues). Secondly, it poses critical open questions in sociocultural research concerning the relationship between culture and institutions, within-country cultural differences, and culture in dynamics. It demonstrates how the research into culture is connected to the studies of social capital. Finally, the paper formulates the theses of the sociocultural economics research field.

The article examines the impact of social capital and institutional trust on attitudes towards innovation. On a sample of 6077 respondents representing 10 Russian regions, it was found that social capital and institutional trust positively influence the attitude towards technologies in general. The analysis of a specific technology (automated judicial systems) showed that the relationship can also be reversed: the lower the social capital, the more positively the respondents refer to the introduction of new technology. These results may indicate that in conditions of poor institutional environment and in spheres that require high interpersonal and institutional trust, technologies allowing people to go to depersonalized relationships may be accepted, despite the negative attitude towards technologies in general. The findings allow us to take a fresh look at the prospects of introducing breakthrough technologies depending on the socio-cultural and institutional environment and contribute to the development of research on the impact of socio-cultural factors on the economy.

The paper investigates cross-cultural differences across Russian regions using the methodology of G. Hofstede. First, it discusses the most common approaches in measuring culture and the application of the Hofstede methodology in subnational studies. It identifies the critical issues in measuring culture at the regional level and suggests several strategies to address them. Secondly, the paper introduces subregional data on individualism and uncertainty avoidance using a survey of students across 27 Russian universities. The data allow to establish geographical patterns of individualism in Russia. It is demonstrated that collectivism is most prevalent in the Volga region, while individualism characteristic becomes stronger towards the Far East. The findings are robust to the inclusion of various controls and different specifications of the regression model. Finally, the paper provides a discussion about the potential of applying the sociocultural approach in economics.

We study the relation between trust and economic growth. We explore the history of the topic and conduct empirical analysis using all the available data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, including data for the recent years. We show that results of the classic models that establish positive relation between trust and economic growth do not replicate on the most recent data. Moreover, neither use of alternative indicators of trust, nor dividing the countries into the groups depending on institutional quality yields to the appearance of relation. We discuss possible reasons for the absence of relation between trust and economic growth in the recent years, in particular, the changing role of trust in the modern world, and point to the importance of more detailed exploration of the mechanisms of relation between trust and economic growth.