A popular uprising in 2014, led to a revolution overthrowing the sitting president of Burkina Faso. We investigate if individuals' risk attitudes changed due to this revolution. Specifically, we investigate the impact of the revolution on risk attitudes, by gender, age and level of education....

The importance of the prehistoric migration of anatomically modern humans from Africa for comparative economic development has been the focus of a vibrant research agenda in the past decade. This influential literature has attracted the attention of some scholars from other disciplines, and in...

This paper explores intergenerational transmission of culture and the consequences of a plausible assumption: that people care not only for their children’s culture but also for how their grand-children are raised. This departs from the previous literature which, without exception, assumes...

This research empirically establishes the hypothesis that the process of population aging in a society as a whole affects the attitudes of its members towards immigration. Hence, an aging social environment exerts an effect on the attitudes of individuals towards immigration after accounting for...

Utilizing the new Global Preference Survey (GPS) by Falk et al. (2018) and its data of unique scope on national preference structures in patience, risk attitude, reciprocity, trust and altruism, we are the first to explore a potential in uence on international trade outcomes of this broad set of...

We present a theory of identity politics that builds on two ideas. First, voters identify with the social group whose interests are closest to theirs and that features the strongest policy conflict with outgroups. Second, identification causes voters to slant their beliefs of self and others...

Why is modern society capable of cumulative innovation? In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr persuasively argues that sustained technological progress stemmed from a change in cultural beliefs. The change occurred gradually during the seventeenth and eighteenth...

Intergenerational correlations of time preference are well documented. However, there is still limited empirical evidence about the role of genetics in this transmission process. In our paper, we use data on roughly 3,000 twins from the German TwinLife project to estimate the heritability of...

This research explores the origins of loss aversion and the variation in its prevalence across regions, nations and ethnic group. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that the evolution of loss aversion in the course of human history can be traced to the adaptation of...

This research explores the geographical origins of the coevolution of cultural and linguistic traits in the course of human history, relating the geographical roots of long-term orientation to the structure of the future tense, the agricultural determinants of gender bias to the presence of...