We advance the hypothesis that cultural values such as high work ethic and thrift, “the Protestant ethic” according to MaxWeber, may have been diffused long before the Reformation, thereby importantly affecting the pre-industrial growth record. The source of pre-Reformation Protestant ethic,...

Across 800 regions of the World, this research shows that people are more religious when living in regions that are more frequently razed by natural disasters. This is in line with psychological theory stressing that religious people tend to cope with adverse life events by seeking comfort in...

We develop a measure of the timing of industrialization, comparable across 149 countries. Defining the year of industrial transition as the year in which employment in industry exceeded that in agriculture, we identify 67 countries that industrialized between 1801 and 2005 and 82 countries that...

We show that societies with a history of irrigation-based agriculture have been less likely to adopt democracy than societies with a history of rain fed agriculture. Rather than actual irrigation, the empirical analysis is based on how much irrigation potentially can increase yields. Irrigation...

We hypothesize that the spread of the Internet has reduced corruption, chiefly through two mechanisms. First, the Internet facilitates the dissemination of information about corrupt behavior, which raises the detection risks to shady bureaucrats and politicians. Second, the Internet has reduced...