During the roughly 190,000 years between the emergence of anatomically modern humans and the transition to agriculture, sustained economic progress was rare. Although there were important innovations in the Upper Paleolithic, evidence from paleodemography indicates that population densities were...

Hereditary economic inequality is unknown among mobile foragers, but hereditary class distinctions between elites and commoners exist in some sedentary foraging societies. With agriculture, such stratification tends to become more pronounced. We develop a model to explain the associations among...

Until about 13,000 years ago all humans obtained their food through hunting and gathering, but thereafter people in some parts of the world began a transition to agriculture. Recent data strongly implicate climate change as the driving force behind the transition in southwest Asia. We propose a...

Recent writers have asserted that firms controlled by workers are rare because workers have diverse preferences over firm policies, and thus suffer from high transaction costs in making collective decisions. This is contrasted with firms controlled by investors, who all support the goal of...

The duel of honor was a highly ritualized violent activity practiced (mostly) by aristocrats from about 1500 to 1900. The duel of honor was held in private, was attended by seconds and other members of society, was illegal, and often resulted from trivial incidents. Duels were fought according...

Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries English peasants faced large income shocks relative to mean incomes. Innovations in property rights over land induced peasants to respond by trading small parcels of land as part of their risk coping strategy. The same period witnessed a dramatic...

The 13th century witnessed a substantial increase in inequality in the distribution of peasant landholdings relative to the distribution of the late 11th century. Innovations in property rights over land in 12th century England induced peasants to include the trading of small parcels of land as...