In a 1996 survey of U.S. military personnel, more than 65 percent experienced racially offensive behavior, and approximately one-in-ten reported threatening incidents or careerrelated racial discrimination. Perceived racial harassment is driven by social classifications that extend beyond racial...

Personnel records are used to examine compensation, recruitment, and retention of a group of very highly skilled workers: civilian scientists and engineers in U.S. Department of Defense laboratories. In contrast to the private sector, returns to skills were largely flat for this group from...

We investigate how nondemocratic regimes use the military and how this can lead to the emergence of military dictatorships. Nondemocratic regimes need the use of force in order to remain in power, but this creates a political moral hazard problem; a strong military may not simply work as an...

Our results indicate that two-thirds of active-duty military personnel report experiencing offensive racial behaviors in the previous 12 months, while approximately one in ten report threatening racial incidents or career-related discrimination. Racial harassment significantly increases job...

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...

Martin Luther urged each town to have a girls' school so that girls would learn to read the Gospel, evoking a surge of building girls' schools in Protestant areas. Using county- and town-level data from the first Prussian census of 1816, we show that a larger share of Protestants decreased the...