This chapter examines the role of religion in economic development, both historically and today. Religion's influence varies globally, with high religiosity in countries like Pakistan and low rates in China. Despite declines in some Western countries, religion remains influential worldwide, with...

This research provides an explanation for high literacy, economic growth and societal developments in the Netherlands in the period before the Dutch Republic. We establish a link between the Brethren of the Common Life (BCL), a religious community founded by Geert Groote in the city of Deventer...

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...

The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the "sending" countries in Africa, with attention to their economic,...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

The Axial Age, which lasted between 800 B. C. E. and 200 B. C. E., covers an era in which the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in various geographic areas, and all three major monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were born between 1200 B. C....

This paper documents the persistence of the Southern slave owning elite in political power after the end of the American Civil War. We draw on a database of Texan state legislators between 1860 and 1900 and link them to their or their ancestors' slaveholdings in 1860. We then show that former...

We use recent immigration data from 195 countries and propose an index of population diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is then decomposed into a size (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 disaggregated...

Do populations grow as countries become richer? In this paper we estimate the effects on population growth of shocks to national income that are plausibly exogenous and unlikely to be driven by technological change. For a panel of over 139 countries spanning the period 1960-2007 we interact...