Hayek Program Podcast · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Nava Ashraf — 2024 Markets and Society Conference Keynote

April 2, 2025·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

After the introduction, Ashraf frames the keynote around the economics of trust. She describes how women in the Zambia material report learning their trade more often through courses than through other entrepreneurs or family, while men more often learn from people around them. She then turns to trust: on the World Value Survey measure, the share saying most people can be trusted is lower among women than men, and she notes that this pattern matches findings from many countries. She broadens the discussion to cooperation, where joint buying, lending, advice, and sharing orders are all lower among women than among men. She averages those measures and finds that the gap still holds. To connect the survey results to behavior, she checks whether the trust measure aligns with trust games, and it does. She also notes that the cooperation measures are highly correlated with sales. From there, Ashraf uses interviews and focus groups to show the mechanisms behind the statistics. One tailor describes dealing with men who do not reliably finish work, steal, or disappear. The language is blunt, but it makes the point clearly: repeated experience can make cooperation feel risky. Ashraf then asks what institutions might reduce that risk. She does not treat distrust as fixed; instead, she presents it as a response to environment and enforcement. The broader claim is that institutional improvements can let people who fear exploitation take part in trade more fully. In that sense, the talk links micro evidence to a larger argument about productive entrepreneurial growth and gains that can reach groups with less power.

As heard by us

A clear case for how trust, cooperation, and institutions shape market participation and economic opportunity.

Dr. Nava Ashraf's keynote treats trust, cooperation, and institutions as hard economic forces, not background noise. In Zambia, it compares how women and men learn trades, judge risk, and build commercial ties, then threads those patterns through survey responses, trust-game…

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You want a keynote that makes trust and institutions feel economically decisive, not decorative filler.

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