This paper identifies a new source of differences in religiosity: the presence of future tense marking in language. We argue that the rewards and punishments that incentivise religious behaviour are less effective for speakers of languages that contain future tense marking. Consistent with this...

We examine the gender legacy of past institutions by comparing Italian municipalities located in a narrow band across the borders between the former Papal States on the one hand, and the former Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Duchy of Modena on the other. Our results show that a century after the...

How does conflict exposure affect trust? We hypothesize that direct (first-hand) experience with conflict induces parochialism: trust towards out-groups worsens, but trust towards in-groups, owing to positive experiences of kin solidarity, may improve. Indirect exposure to conflict through...

We study the association between the ritual of menstrual restrictions and maternal health- care access as well as women's subjective well-being. Similar restrictions, also practised around the time of childbirth, are based on the assumption that women are ritually impure during these phases of...

This paper studies the effect of religion on the economic progress of Black Americans after Reconstruction. Southern religious institutions-particularly the Southern Baptist church-played a key role in the development of the Lost Cause mythology that helped legitimate the white supremacist...

Communism was a two-edged sword for the trustees of the former regime. Communist party members and their relatives enjoyed status and privileges, while secret police informants were often coerced to work clandestinely and gather compromising materials about friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We...

This paper studies to what extent banning first-generation women from aborting affected the fertility of second-generation individuals who did not face such legal constraint. Using multiple censuses from Romania, I follow men and women born around the 1966 Romanian abortion ban to study the...

This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary 1949-2017, for upper class and underclass families, using surnames to measure social status. In these years there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian People's Republic, 1949-1989, a Communist regime with an...

We study the potential for pleasant and cooperative contact to reduce preconceived prejudice between religious groups in the context of India. We randomly assign Hindus and Muslims into groups, in which they interact over the course of a week-long vocational training program. We find that...

While under communism the identity-providing religion was suppressed, religiosity is strong today even among the youth in post-communist countries. This provides an appropriate background to investigate how external and internal religiosity relates to risky behaviors like smoking, drinking, and...