This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...

We study the origins of entrepreneurship (culture) in the United States. For the analysis we make use of a quasi-natural experiment – the gold rush in the second part of the 19th century. We argue that the presence of gold attracted individuals with entrepreneurial personality traits. Due to a...

We investigate the legacy of the former Papal States on modern female condition by comparing Italian municipalities located in a narrow band across the border between the former Papal States and the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany. While in the Papal States gender inequality was particularly...

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China's 1980 one-child law. The results...

Whether people of differing types can live happily together is one of the most important social and political questions concerning urban areas. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, such mixing seems extremely unlikely. While the theoretical result seems well supported in the context of...

The present paper provides an overview of literature on the shift to services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change - final demand, the inter-industry division of labor and inter-industry productivity differences. It first looks at the ?classics?, however (Fisher (1935), Clark...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

This paper addresses two main questions: (a) Has European integration hindered the implementation of labour, financial and product market structural reforms? (b) Do the effects of these reforms vary more across sectors than across countries? Using more granular reform measures, longer time...

Beginning in the late 1970s, China's economy delivered the largest growth spurt in recorded history. Striking discontinuity between recent outcomes and the economic experience of the prior 200 years invites portrayal of recent events as a "China miracle" that requires neither economic nor...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...