This paper surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history, covering both socioeconomic … causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly growing literature, it focuses on the three main monotheisms … Islam and Islamic institutions played in political-economy outcomes and in the "long divergence" between the Middle East and …

This paper argues that corruption in Russia is systemic in nature. Low wage levels of public officials provide strong … incentives to engage in corruption. As corruption is illegal, corrupt officials can be exposed any time, which enforces loyalty … towards the powers that be; thus corruption is a method of governance. We trace the systemic corruption back to the Mongolian …

The interplay between religion and the economy has occupied social scientists for long. We construct a unique panel of … doubt on causal interpretations of the religion-economy nexus in Prussian secularization. -- religion ; secularization …

social capital; then, social capital determines the level of corruption; finally, corruption affects economic performance. We … test this hypothesis on a dataset of Italian provinces, and address the possible endogeneity of corruption by applying an … IV model. We use three sets of historical instruments for corruption: 1) foreign dominations in 16th-17th century, 2 …