In this paper, I test the effects of religious norms on the provision of public goods. My evidence is drawn from public goods experiments that I ran with regional bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Russia. I introduce three treatments, which I define as degrees of Eastern Orthodox...

In this paper, we analyze the effects of religious identity - defined both as personal identification with a religious tradition and institutional ideas on the provision of public goods - on attitudes toward central government. We explore whether citizens belonging to collectivist rather than...

In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the emergence of democracies and dictatorships. Religion is defined as a stochastically set demand for public goods. Different types of religious collectives reflect different tradeoffs between centralized resource distribution and market rewards....

Competing definitions of justice in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics indicate the existence of two distinct economic systems with different normative priorities. The three-class society of the Platonic economy (guardians, auxiliaries, producers) gives rise to guardians who by virtue are...

In this paper, we analyze the growth effects of historical and biological ancestry, diversity and financial development in transition economies. We show that the common indicators of ethnolinguistic fractionalization, state history and genetic distance yield significant results and to some...

Resource-rich dictatorships are more inclined to repress civil society than others. In this paper, we identify a tradeoff between political rents from natural resources and the organizational density of civil society. This organizational density determines the extent to which citizens can...

This project re-investigates the hookworm eradication efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation's Sanitary Commission (RSC) in the American South during the Progressive Era. The RSC worked to eradicate hookworm across 11 southern states between 1911 and 1915, efforts that have been linked to...

In this paper, we explore the long-run effects of cultural and imperial legacies in the Baltic region. Drawing evidence from the 1897 population census in the Russian Empire, we find that localities with a higher share of German historical population are inclined to be more developed in...

During the European financial crisis, the European Central Bank implemented a series of unconventional monetary policy measures. We argue that these unconventional monetary policy measures created soft budget constraints for the Eurozone countries by lowering their bond yield spreads. This...

Proxy wars are a key pattern of political conflict and interstate competition. Rather than resorting to direct conflicts, which are costly and entail a higher level of uncertainty, governments may opt for proxy wars, which may last longer, but are less costly and render them more immune to...