‘Eurasia' seems to be a relatively clear concept in terms of physical geography, but much less so for social sciences. While the word ‘Eurasia' is constantly used in various contexts (more today than twenty years ago), the specific notion of what it actually means is unclear. According to...

Although largely absent from modern accounts of the Industrial Revolution, watches were the first mass produced consumer durable, and were Adam Smith's pre-eminent example of technological progress. In fact, Smith makes the notable claim that watch prices may have fallen by up to 95 per cent...

We estimate the self-selection of Mexican migrants into and out of the United States in the 1920s. Officials recorded migrant height on border crossing manifests, which we use to proxy migrant quality and to measure self-selection into migration in 1920. Migrants were positively selected on...

The Bracero Program was a massive guest worker program that allowed over four million Mexican workers to migrate legally and work temporarily in the United States from 1942 to 1964. This paper examines the development impacts of the program, especially its effect on individual investments....

The Bracero Program was a massive guest worker program that allowed over four million Mexican workers to migrate legally and work temporarily in the United States from 1942 to 1964. This paper examines the development impacts of the program. Exploiting a natural experiment in the institutional...

We analyze organization of auctions and bidding strategies with a unique dataset on Paris auctions between 700s and 800s. Prices reflect the objective features of the paintings and of the sale, and they reveal a substantial death effect, with upward jumps in the years after the death of the...

This paper analyzes the consequences of radical patent-regime change by exploiting a natural experiment: the forced adoption of the Prussian patent system in territories annexed after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Compared to other German states, Prussia granted patents more restrictively by...

We use databases we have created from the records of New York's Emigrant Savings Bank, founded by pre-Famine Irish immigrants and their children to serve Famine era immigrants, to study the social mobility of bank customers and, by extension, Irish immigrants more generally. We infer that New...

This paper reviews the growing body of evidence on the relative economic standing of different regions of the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In general, it does not find support for Eurocentric claims regarding Western Europe's early economic lead. The Eurocentric...

According to the widely known 'culture of honor' hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records,...