This research explores the effects of culture on technological diffusion and economic development. It shows that culture's direct effects on development and barrier effects to technological diffusion are, in general, observationally equivalent. In particular, using a large set of measures of...

A strong and competitive Travel and Tourism (T&T) sector contributes in many ways to the development of a region or an economy. It makes both direct contributions, by raising the national income and improving the balance of payments, and indirect contributions, via its multiplier effect. Tourism...

This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. Exploiting a variety of identification strategies and a novel ethnic level dataset combining geocoded ethnographic, linguistic and genetic data, it shows that higher levels of intra-ethnic diversity...

The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-sample information to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry distribution for US counties...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically that geographical variations in the natural return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on the distribution of time preference...

I investigate the consequences of long-run persistency of a society's preferences for cultural goods. Historical cultural activity is approximated with the frequency of births of music composers during the Renaissance and is linked with contemporary measures of cultural activity in Italian...

This paper reviews recent economics literature on culture, with an emphasis on its relation to the field of long-run growth and development. It examines the key issues debated in the new cultural economics: causal effects of culture on economic outcomes, the origins and social costs of culture,...