This paper surveys the existing literature on religious and cultural leaders. It discusses potential motivations of a leader and highlights that irrespective of his/her exact motivations, the presence of a leader is crucial for the cultural heterogeneity of a society. The impact of...

"We show that much of the recent reported decrease in interstate migration is a statistical artifact. Before 2006, the Census Bureau's imputation procedure for dealing with missing data inflated the estimated interstate migration rate. An undocumented change in the procedure corrected the...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on regional-national disparities in environmental efficiency, based on case studies of Italy and the Lazio region, which includes the city of Rome. Shift-share analyses provide evidence on the drivers of environmental efficiency and on sector...