In this chapter we survey recent advances in modeling cultural transmission in the economics literature. We first present the basic canonical model of the evolution of cultural traits in the social sciences. Both Economics and Evolutionary anthropology build on this canonical model but their...

Culture shapes how policies are made and how people react to them. This chapter explores how culture and development policy affect each other. First, we provide evidence that cultural mismatch -- specifically a mismatch between project manager background and the location of project...

In previous work we have highlighted the importance of revisions to state constitutions that mandated that laws be general and uniform throughout the state. Indiana (in 1851) was the first state to adopt a general-law mandate, but most other states followed suit by the end of the century--most...

Digitized historical newspaper databases offer a valuable research tool. A rapidly expanding set of studies use these databases to address a wide range of topics. We review this literature and provide a toolkit for researchers interested in working with historical newspaper data. We provide a...

Why do some leaders invest in significant nation-building policies and others do not? Why does nation-building occur at certain junctures in time and not others? In our research, we investigate what motivates leaders to nation build. We argue that threats to their regime motivate rulers to...

Evidence suggests that the prehistoric Out of Africa Migration has impacted the degree of intra-population genetic and phenotypic diversity across the globe. This paper provides the first evidence that this migration has shaped cultural diversity. Leveraging a folklore catalogue of 958 oral...

What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures,...

We analyze the impact of World War II service on income and mobility among male Army and Army Airforce veterans from various racial and ethnic groups, using linked 1940 Census, WWII enlistment, and 1969 administrative tax return data. The dataset includes non-Hispanic White, Black, Hispanic,...

In the presence of segregation and discrimination during the late 19th and early 20th century, many African American men changed their racial identity and "passed" for white. Previous studies have suggested that this activity was associated with increases in income and socioeconomic status...

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information linking parents to their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link...