Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our empirical analysis exploits rainfall risk as a source of common...

This paper analyzes the relationship between ethnic fractionalization, polarization, and conflict. In recent years many authors have found empirical evidence that ethnic fractionalization has a negative effect on growth. One mechanism that can explain this nexus is the effect of ethnic...

This paper ia an attempt to clarify the relationship between fractionalization, polarization and conflict. The literature on the measurement of ethnic diversity has taken as given that the proper measure for heterogeneity can be calculated by using the fractionalization index. This index is...

Using a rich dataset of territories and cities of the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century, this paper investigates the determinants of adoption and diffusion of Protestantism as a state religion. A territory’s distance to Wittenberg, the city where Martin Luther taught, is a major...

Many theories, most famously Max Weber’s essay on the “Protestant ethic,” have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their considerable religious heterogeneity and stability of denominational affiliations until the 19th century, the German Lands of...

We develop a theory of news coverage in environments of information abundance that include both new and traditional news media, from online and print newspapers to radio and television. News consumers are time-constrained and browse through news items that are available across competing outlets,...

More and more academic journals adopt an open-access policy, by which articles are accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on a journal’s quality standard. If the journal’s objective was to...

We consider competition among sellers when each of them sells a portfolio of distinct products to a buyer having limited slots. We study how bundling affects competition for slots. Under independent pricing, equilibrium often does not exist and hence the outcome is often inefficient. When...

Electronic academic journal websites provide new services of text and/or data mining and linking, indispensable for e¢ cient allocation of attention among abun- dant sources of scienti?c information. Fully realizing the bene?t of these services requires interconnection among websites. Motivated...

In this paper we study, as in Jeon-Menicucci (2009), competition between sellers when each of them sells a portfolio of distinct products to a buyer having limited slots. This paper considers sequential pricing and complements our main paper (Jeon- Menicucci, 2009) that considers simultaneous...