We randomly vary religious identity salience in laboratory subjects to test how identity salience contributes to six hypothesized links from prior literature between religious identity and economic behavior. We find that religious identity salience makes Protestants increase contributions to...

To test the causal impact of religiosity, we conducted a randomized evaluation of an evangelical Protestant Christian values and theology education program that consisted of 15 weekly half-hour sessions. We analyze outcomes for 6,276 ultra-poor Filipino households six months after the program...

Using novel microdata, we document an unintended, first-order consequence of the Protestant Reformation: a massive reallocation of resources from religious to secular purposes. To understand this process, we propose a conceptual framework in which the introduction of religious competition shifts...

We investigate the rise of the religious right in the context of the Moral Majority and Jimmy Carter, the first Evangelical President. During Carter's Presidency, the Moral Majority, an Evangelical group headed by televangelist Jerry Falwell, turned against the incumbent Carter, a Democrat, and...

We explore the response of employment (unemployment) skill differentials to skill-biased shifts in demand touched off by the new and spreading technologies. We find that skill differentials in unemployment follow at least in part the same pattern as skill differentials in wages: They widen...

This paper studies the role of technology in local-government tax collection capacity in the developing world. We first conduct a new census of all local governments in Ghana to document a strong association between technology use and property tax billing, collection and enforcement. We then...

We show how to use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and their associated high-level synthesis (HLS) compilers to solve heterogeneous agent models with incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty (Krusell and Smith, 1998). We document that the acceleration delivered by one single FPGA is...

In this paper we estimate variants of a labor demand equation derived from a (restricted variable) cost function in which "experience"on a technology (proxied by the mean age of the capital stock) enters "non-neutrally." Our specification of the underlying cost function isbased on the hypothesis...

This paper presents an international comparison of R&D activities in basic and applied research. The commonly-held view that Japan is not spending much on basic technology development cannot be empirically substantiated from the study of the historical trends. However, the fact that in the...

This paper studies the effects of university STEM education on innovation and labor market outcomes by exploiting a change in enrollment requirements in Italian STEM majors. University-level scientific education had two direct effects on the development of patents by students who had acquired a...