Beliefs about whether effort pays off govern some of the most fundamental choices individuals make. This paper uses China's Cultural Revolution to understand how these beliefs can be affected, how they impact behavior, and how they are transmitted across generations. During the Cultural...

What shapes citizens' trust in the government, and what makes it persist over time? We study the causal effect of the Great Chinese Famine (1958-1961) on the survivors' political distrust. Using a novel nationally representative survey, we employ a difference-in-differences framework to compare...

This 263-page book is fascinating not only for its vivid account of the history of the American West but also for its economic analysis of the spontaneous emergence of property rights. In Hollywood movies, the center stage belongs to gunslingers who profit through violence. In The Not So Wild,...

The paper examines the interdependence of historical legacies and current contextual factors as determinants of economic and political performance. It shows that behavioral patterns based on identical legacies could lead to very different (if not the opposite) results in regions with different...

This paper studies the dynamic process of revolutions and mass protests. In a unified framework we explain three classes of revolutions that have been observed historically and earlier models cannot explain: 1) a revolution where the most extreme opponents of the regime protest fiercely and...

In this paper, we analyze the long-run effects of Western and Japanese imperial expansion on the survival of Confucian values in China and Taiwan. Mainland China and Taiwan had been under the rule of the Qing dynasty and shared the same culture and societal structure before the onset of imperial...