This study shows that the Xero Small Business Index (XSBI) monthly sales growth data can be used to predict the same period's nominal gross domestic product (GDP) growth (year-on-year) in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.1 Assuming that the small business sector can be used as a...

We study the relationship between media attention and major choices by evaluating how newspaper reports on violence against doctors in China deter students from choosing medicine as their college majors. We collect relevant articles from over 1,200 newspapers and combine them with an...

Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich...

This paper explores the role of the gender equality culture in cross-country gender commuting gap differences. To avoid inter-relationships between culture, institutions, and economic conditions in a simple cross-country analysis, we adopt the epidemiological approach. We merge data from the...

Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich...

In this paper, we examine whether culture plays a role in the gender division of household labor. To explore this issue, we use data on early-arrival first and second generation immigrants living in the United States. Since all these individuals have grown up under the same laws, institutions,...

In this paper, we analyze the role of culture in determining whether, or not, an individual is a homeowner. We use data on first-generation immigrants who arrived in the United States under 6 years old. Following the epidemiological approach, those early-arrival immigrants grew up under the same...

This paper analyzes the occupational status and distribution of free women in the antebellum United States. It considers both their reported and unreported (imputed) occupations, using the 1/100 IPUMS files from the 1860 Census of Population. After developing and testing the model based on...

Using firm-level data on 11,000 companies across seven countries in South Asia, this paper explores the effects of access to finance on employment growth and performance at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the impact of financing obstacles varies across firm sizes. The results show that...

This paper examines the impact of male casualties due to World War II on fertility and female employment in the United States. We rely on the number of casualties at the county-level and use a difference-in-differences strategy. While most counties in the U.S. experienced a Baby Boom following...