We propose a unified growth theory to investigate the mechanics generating the economic and demographic transition, and the role of mortality differences for comparative development. The framework can replicate the quantitative patterns in historical time series data and in contemporaneous...

Beyond years of schooling, educational content can play an important role in the process of economic development. Individuals' choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first present...

Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple...

The paper is a case study of the city of Banska Bystrica in Slovakia in the light of political, socio-economic and cultural changes. It discusses urban diversity and integrity from an anthropological qualitative perspective. On the example of three different historical periods (1918 - 1948: the...

The paper is an overview of diversity in history, starting as far back as the societies in classical Ancient Europe and traditional non-European societies, where differentiation was basically between the enslaved and free population and the out-of-caste in India. With the end of slavery the...

This paper exploits the unexpected decline of deaths from cardiovascular diseases since the 1970s as a large positive health shock that affected predominantly old-age mortality; i.e., the fourth stage of the epidemiological transition. Using a differences-in-differences estimation strategy, we...

This research establishes that the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrastate conflicts in the modern era reflect the long shadow of prehistory. Exploiting variations across national populations, it demonstrates that genetic diversity, as determined predominantly during the...

A 2015 World Bank report on attainment of Millennium Development Goals concludes that the number of extremely poor has dropped substantially in all regions with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa. We assess if poverty is in the African gene by revisiting the findings of Ashraf and Galor (2013,...

The literature has not sufficiently engaged the emergence and expansion of the phenomenon of Slave export. This article contributes to the existing stream by examining the role of human capital or intelligence on slave exports. We postulate and justify a reasonable hypothesis that countries...

This paper uses new data on Swedish national wealth over a period of two hundred years to study whether the patterns in wealth-income ratios previously found by Piketty and Zucman (2014) for some very rich and large Western economies extend to smaller countries that were historically backward...