Why do some leaders invest in significant nation-building policies and others do not? Why does nation-building occur at certain junctures in time and not others? In our research, we investigate what motivates leaders to nation build. We argue that threats to their regime motivate rulers to...

Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children...

This paper examines the evolving effects of England's Old Poor Law (1601-1834). It establishes that poor relief reduced social unrest from around the late-17th century through the turn of the 19th century, at which point it began to spur population growth and its social stability effects...

Although cross section relationships are often taken to indicate causation, and especially the important impact of economic growth on many social phenomena, they may, in fact, merely reflect historical experience, that is, similar leader-follower country patterns for variables that are causally...

According to the widely known 'culture of honor' hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records,...

The use of historical data has become a standard tool in economics, serving three main purposes: to examine the influence of the past on current economic outcomes; to use unique natural experiments to test modern economic theories; and to use modern economic theories to refine our understanding...

Few researchers have examined the nature and determinants of earnings differentials amongreligious groups, and none has been undertaken in the context of conflict-prone multireligioussocieties like the one in India. We address this lacuna in the literature by examiningthe differences in the...

This paper investigates certain issues of economic and ethnic segregation from theperspective of children in the three metropolitan regions of Sweden by using a relative newoperationalization of the neighbourhood concept. Neighbourhoods are clustered bypopulation share of visible immigrants in...

Are ethnic specialization and thus a downward sloping labor demand curve fundamentalfeatures of labor market competition between ethnic groups? In a general equilibrium model,this paper argues that spillover effects in skill acquisition and social distances between ethnicgroups engender...

Using unique register data for Sweden we can match self-employed persons to theiremployees. We analyze the national composition of the employees and ask if self-employedimmigrants mainly employ workers from their home region and if self-employed nativesmainly employ native workers...