The importance of evolutionary forces for comparative economic performance across societies has been the focus of a vibrant literature, highlighting the roles played by the Neolithic Revolution and the prehistoric "out of Africa" migration of anatomically modern humans in generating worldwide...

This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in...

This research advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that interpersonal population diversity has contributed significantly to the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrasocietal conflicts. Exploiting an exogenous source of variations in population diversity across...

The Jobs of the World Project is a public resource designed to enable research on jobs and poverty across and within countries over the entire development spectrum. At its core is a new data set assembled by harmonising Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and National Censuses (IPUMS) for all...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

Which types of human capital influence the adoption of advanced technologies? We study the skill-biased adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) across two waves in the UK. Specifically, we compare the "new wave" of cloud and machine learning / AI technologies during the...