This book highlights the contribution of language standardization to the economic rise of the West between 1600 and 1860. Previous studies have been unable to explain why during this period almost all industrial innovation was confined to small areas around the main cultural centers of three...

The encounter with insurgency violence in Iraq and Afghanistan has pressed the US Department of Defense to improve the US military's ability to conduct counterinsurgency. It has been argued that this shift may constitute a turning point in the history of the US military, which until now has...

This paper shows that cross country differences in the generosity and the quality of the welfare state are associated with differences in the trustworthiness of their citizens. We show that generous, transparent and efficient welfare states in Scandinavian countries are based on the civicness of...

Social experiments are powerful sources of information about the effectiveness of interventions. In practice, initial randomization plans are almost always compromised. Multiple hypotheses are frequently tested. Significant effects are often reported with p-values that do not account for...