Is humanity's circle of moral concern expanding, as often claimed? I explore frequencies of morally universal language in 15m book publications in American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian from 1800-2000. In each language, morally universal terminology diminished...

This paper suggests that societies exhibiting a large degree of educational polarization among its populace are systematically more likely to slip into civil conflict and civil war. Intuitively, political preferences and beliefs of highly educated citizens are likely to differ fundamentally from...

This paper introduces a methodology to measure misreported trade in a consistent way across countries and over time. Our methodology does not require any assumptions about which countries may be more or less likely to misreport – rather, all indices are derived endogenously with available...

This paper argues that UN military interventions are geographically biased. For every 1,000 kilometers of distance from the three Western permanent UNSC members (France, UK, US), the probability of a UN military intervention decreases by 4 percent. We are able to rule out several alternative...

Are people prone to selecting occupations with highly skewed income distributions despite minuscule chances of success? Assembling a comprehensive pool of potential teenage entrants into professional tennis (a typical winner-take-all market), we construct objective measures of relative ability...

This paper reconsiders the effects of volatile growth rates on growth itself. I show that the underlying endogeneity of government size can hide the net growth effects from volatility. There exists a positive direct and a negative indirect channel, with the latter operating through the size of...

Focused on human capital, economists typically explain about half of the gender earnings gap. For a national sample of MBAs, we account for 82 percent of the gap by incorporating noncognitive skills (e.g., confidence and assertiveness) and preferences regarding family, career, and jobs. Those...

This paper analyzes the microeconomic sources of wage inequality in the United States from 1967-2012. Decomposing inequality into factors categorized by degree of personal responsibility, we find that education is able to explain more than twice as much of inequality today as 45 years ago....

When do opposition groups decide to mount a terrorism campaign and when do they enter an open civil conflict against the ruling government? This paper models an opposition group's choice between peace, terrorism, and open conflict. Terrorism emerges if executive constraints are intermediate and...