This paper introduces the Small World model (Watts and Strogatz, Nature, 1998) into the theory of economic growth and investigates how increasing economic integration affects firm size and effciency, norm enforcement, and aggregate economic performance. When economic integration is low and local...

We investigate how social composition affects competitive and cooperative behaviour in a linear growth model without secure property rights. If a society is homogeneous or highly fractionalized, it is in the self-interest of people to cooperate. The first-best allocation is enforced through...

This paper integrates imperfect self-control into the standard model of endogenous growth. Individuals are conceptualized as “dual-selves” consisting of a long-run planner and a short-run doer. The long-run self can partly control the short-run self's strife for immediate gratification. It...

It is a well known fact that economic development and distance to the equator are positively correlated variables in the world today. It is perhaps less well known that as recently as 1500 C.E. it was the other way around. The present paper provides a theory of why the "latitude gradient"...

In this paper we examine the long-run relationship between religiosity and income using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries from 1925 to 1990. We employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias and test...

Successful economic development is usually characterized by two salient phenomena: industrialization and demographic transition. Chronologically both events happen so closely to each other that historians and economists alike suspect that they are interrelated. This paper develops a theory for...

During the World Cup 2006 Germany experienced a surge of revealed patriotism unseen so far after World War II. How can this unexpected and spontaneous change of social behavior be explained given that preference (for patriotism) are stable over time? This essay introduces and discusses three...