We posit that historical resource scarcities played a role in the emergence of gender norms inimical to women that persist to this day. This thesis is supported by our finding that nations’ historical resource endowments, as measured by the historical availability of arable land, are...

Why did substantial parts of Europe abandon the institutionalized churches around 1900? Empirical studies using modern data mostly contradict the traditional view that education was a leading source of the seismic social phenomenon of secularization. We construct a unique panel dataset of...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

Pakistan's education system faces long-standing problems in access, quality, and equal opportunity at every level: primary and secondary schools, higher education and vocational education. In spite of recent encouraging trends, such as the rapid spread of private schooling and an expansion of...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically, that geographical variations in natural land productivity and their impact on the return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on...

Globally installed wind power capacity has grown tremendously since 2000. This study focuses on the local economic impacts of wind power deployment. A theoretical model shows that wind power deployment is not necessarily driven by locally-accruing economic payoffs, but also by other factors such...

Several recent empirical studies have examined the gender effects of education on economic growth or on steady-state level of output using the much exploited, familiar cross-country data in order to determine their quantitative importance and the direction of correlation. This paper undertakes a...

This paper develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...