According to the widely known 'culture of honor' hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records,...

What should researchers do when confronted with surprising results? Financial access innovations usually leave "temptation" spending unaffected or reduced. However, we found that promotion of savings lockboxes in a largely autarkic society increased alcohol consumption and blood pressure,...

Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that...

This chapter will cover recent research in historical economics that uses ethnographic data and data from surveys and lab experiments. The study of historical economics, particularly outside of non-Western countries, has been constrained by availability of historical data. However, recent work...

African- American motorist in the United States are much more likely than white motorists to have their car searched by police checking for illegal drugs and other contraband. The courts are faced with the task of deciding on the basis of traffic-search data whether police behavior reflects a...

The historical evolution of racial differences in income in the 20th century United States has been examined intensively by economists, but the evolution of racial differences in wealth has been examined far less. This paper uses IPUMS data to study trends in racial differences in home ownership...

We examine trends in self-employment among white and black men from 1910 to 1990 using Census and CPS microdata. Self-employment rates fell over most of the century and then started to rise after 1970. For white men, we find that the decline was due to declining rates within industries, but was...

We examine the possible sources of the larger racial and ethnic wage gaps for men than for women in the U.S. Specifically, using a newly created employer-employee matched data set containing workers in essentially all occupations, industries, and regions, we examine whether these wage...

Critics have said that affirmative action is at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. In particular, it has been argued that if affirmative action helps anybody, it helps only the highly educated cream of the minority population, and may perversely work to the detriment of the...

In this paper we explore income and race differences in nine measures of the health of children aged 6 through 11. We show that when health measures from mid-childhood are the subject of analysis, both income and race differences are much less pronounced than they are in infant mortality and...