Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a society's oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine...

This paper examines how the concept of embedded culture played a transformative role in the ongoing cultural revolution within economics and business. We trace the field's shift from the 20th-century concept of homo economicus universalis to an approach incorporating cultural embeddedness in...

This study reviews the culture and institutions of Confucianism and explores their implications for the trajectory of China's historical development. We trace the origins and evolution of the core elements of Confucianism and synthesize research on its relationship to clan culture, state...

Institutions of justice, like prisons, can be used to serve economic and other extrajudicial interests, with lasting deleterious effects. We study the effects on incarceration when prisoners are primarily used as a source of labor using evidence from British colonial Nigeria. We digitized 65...

During the first half of the twentieth century, many US states enacted laws restricting women's labor market opportunities, including maximum hours restrictions, minimum wage laws, and night-shift bans. The era of so-called protective labor laws came to an end in the 1960s as a result of civil...

Are developing-world cities engines of opportunities for low-wage earners? In this study, we track a cohort of young low-income workers in Brazil for thirteen years to explore the contribution of factors such as industrial structure and skill segregation on upward income mobility. We find that...

This paper examines gender inequality focusing on two critical spheres in which gender inequality is generated: education and work. Our objective is to provide a current snapshot of gender inequality across key indicators as well as a dynamic perspective that highlights successes and failures....

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...

What sparked humanity's leap from stagnation to prosperity? What lies at the core of inequality among nations? Unified Growth Theory explores the evolution of societies over the entire course of human history. It uncovers the universal wheels of change that have governed the journey of humanity,...

Evidence suggests that the prehistoric Out of Africa Migration has impacted the degree of intra-population genetic and phenotypic diversity across the globe. This paper provides the first evidence that this migration has shaped cultural diversity. Leveraging a folklore catalogue of 958 oral...