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...

We investigate the origin, impact and evolution of the legal institution of citizenship. We compile a dataset across countries of the world from the 19th century, which documents how citizenship laws have evolved from the common and civil law traditions. Contrary to the predictions of legal...

We estimate a long-run trend of Brazilian human capital that extends back to the very beginning of the 18th century. With new data on selective immigration during the era of mass migrations at the end of the 19th century, we show that human capital endowment of international migrants can induce...

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...