Abstract: This study reviews and evaluates the motives and incentives behind immigrants’ religiosity, focusing on the two sides of the Atlantic – Europe and the United States. The contribution of the study is mainly empirical, trying to identify indicators for the type of incentive –...

This study explores the effect of several personal religion-related variables on social behaviour, using three paradigmatic economic games: the dictator (DG), ultimatum (UG), and trust (TG) games. A large carefully designed sample of a Spanish urban adult population (N=766) is employed. From...

From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring any Jewish father to educate his children. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this exogenous change in the religious and social norm had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history....

From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring Jewish fathers to educate their sons. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this change in the religious and social norm had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history. First, the high...

Because of their more limited inequality and more comprehensive social welfare systems, many perceive average welfare to be higher in Scandinavian societies than in the United States. Why then does the United States not adopt Scandinavian-style institutions? More generally, in an interdependent...

This paper presents historical indices for the main dimensions of economic freedom and an aggregate index for nowadays developed countries -(pre-1994) OECD, for short-. Economic liberty expanded over the last one-and-a-half centuries, reaching two thirds of its maximum possible. Its evolution...

This paper studies aggregate dynamics in a cobweb model where learning takes place through a selection mecanism, by which more successful firms are replicated at a higher rate. The structure of the model allows to characterize analytically the aggregate dynamics, and to compute the effect on...

In this paper we develop a new empirical approach to uncovering the impact of social attitudes on economic development. We first show that trust of second-generation Americans is significantly influenced by the country of origin of their forebears. In the spirit of the epidemiology literature,...

This paper examines transition dynamics in a search economy. We contrast two extreme cases: a completely unexpected reform and a fully anticipated reform. We view the former as a metaphor for a reform being announced and implemented with immediate effect, the latter as a metaphor for a reform...

This Paper looks at the historical evolution of the relationship between an economy’s structure and the corresponding political system, with a focus on the European experience, starting from feudal times. We show why, in an early agricultural phase, aristocratic political systems prevail,...