The cultural assimilation of immigrants into the host society is often equated with prospects for economic success, with religion seen as a potential barrier. We investigate the role of ethnic enclaves and churches for the assimilation of Danish Americans using a difference-in-differences...

Empirically, a higher frequency of lightning strikes is associated with slower growth in labor productivity across the 48 contiguous US states after 1990; before 1990 there is no correlation between growth and lightning. Other climate variables (e.g., temperature, rainfall and tornadoes) do not...

We test the hypothesis that the Internet is a useful technology for controlling corruption. In order to do so, we develop a novel identification strategy for Internet diffusion. Power disruptions damage digital equipment, which increases the user cost of IT capital, and thus lowers the speed of...

This paper uses two industrial firm surveys to identify the key determinants of credit demand in Mozambican manufacturing. We construct five different measures of being credit constrained and estimate desired debt demand. Besides firm size and ownership structure, we find evidence that general...

We consider the impact of non-violent religious conflict on firm-level productivity. We zoom in on a Protestant and otherwise very homogeneous country: early twentieth century Denmark. We exploit variation due to the emergence of pietist movements who fought for the hearts and minds of Danes. In...

The cultural assimilation of immigrants into the host society is often equated with prospects for economic success, with religion seen as a potential barrier. We investigate the role of ethnic enclaves and churches for the assimilation of Danish Americans using a difference-indifferences...

Religiosity affects everything from fertility and health to labor force participation and productivity. But why are some societies more religious than others? To answer this question, I rely on the religious coping theory, which states that many individuals draw on their religious beliefs to...

We develop a measure of the timing of industrialization, comparable across 149 countries. Defining the year of industrial transition as the year in which employment in industry exceeded that in agriculture, we identify 67 countries that industrialized between 1801 and 2005 and 82 countries that...