This paper empirically revisits the impact of birthplace diversity on economic growth. We use panel data on US states over the 1960-2010 period. This rich data set allows us to better deal with endogeneity issues and to conduct a large set of robustness checks. Our results suggest that diversity...

We investigate whether a causal interpretation of the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth is appropriate and whether cross-country evidence supports a case for the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking...

For several centuries, women's age at first marriage in Western Europe was higher than in the east (and in the rest of the world). Over the same period Western Europe began slow but sustained economic development relative to elsewhere. A model based on the economics of the household explains...

At the individual level, we test the adjustment of the female age at marriage (FAM) to the economic conditions that the supporters of the “European Marriage Pattern” assume. For a typical French village, we collect exhaustive data on families and marriage contracts as well as accurate...

This paper scrutinizes the recently postulated link between the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and economic success. A metastudy of the historical demography literature shows that the EMP did not prevail throughout Europe, its three key components did not always coincide, and its more extreme...

This paper scrutinizes the recently postulated link between the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) and economic success. A metastudy of the historical demography literature shows that the EMP did not prevail throughout Europe, its three key components did not always coincide, and its more extreme...

Voigtländer and Voth argue that the Black Death shifted England towards pastoral agriculture, increasing wages for unmarried women, thereby delaying female marriage, lowering fertility, and unleashing economic growth. We show that this argument does not hold. Its crucial assumption is...

This paper builds an age-structured model of human population genetics in which agents are endowed with a high-dimensional genome that determines their cognitive and physical characteristics. Young adults optimally search for a marriage partner, work for firms, consume goods, save for old age...

The European Marriage Pattern (EMP), in place in NW Europe for perhaps 500 years, substantially limited fertility. But how could such limitation persist when some individuals who deviated from the EMP norm had more children? If their children inherited their deviant behaviors, their descendants...

This paper builds an age-structural model of human population genetics in which agents are endowed with a high-dimensional genome that determines their cognitive and physical characteristics. Young adults optimally search for a marriage partner, work for firms, consume goods, save for old age...