In this Handbook chapter, I examine how integrating ethnographic and folklore records has shaped research on culture and economics in the 21st century. Advances in text analysis techniques and the incorporation of historical and satellite data have transformed the field. I explore how George...

My research suggests that world inequality is explained by the incidence of extractive and inclusive institutions. But why do some countries have extractive institutions? I distinguish between two main reasons; first, power relations; second, the "normative order." Normative orders provide...

We report on the wellbeing of the young in 31 Ex-Soviet Republics located in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We find no evidence of the decline in the mental health of the young relative to older people which characterizes Western Europe and English-speaking advanced economies. The mental...

This paper analyzes whether the propensity to secede by subnational regions responds mostly to differences in income per capita or to distinct identities. We explore this question in a quantitative political economy model where people's willingness to finance a public good depends on their...

How does persecution affect who migrates? We analyze migrants' self-selection out of the USSR and its satellite states before and after the collapse of Communism using census microdata from the three largest destination countries: Germany, Israel, and the United States. We find that migrants...