The historical record of medical expenditures over 3,800 years from the Code of Hammurabi to the current OECD Health Data Set is used to illustrate and analyze long-run trends. Scientific and industrial revolutions, demographic transition, urbanization, nationalism, professional organization,...

This chapter reviews the growing body of research in economics which concentrates on the education gender gap and its evolution, over time and across countries. The survey first focuses on gender differentials in the historical period that roughly goes from 1850 to the 1940s and documents the...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora derived from millions of digitized books. While existing measures of subjective wellbeing go back to at most the 1970s, we can go back at least 200 years further using our...

The present paper complements recent research at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission (UNESCWA) on the Arab Middle Class and discusses the political role of the Middle Class. The objective of the paper is to lay the groundwork for a contextual model of analysis on political...

How do geographic and historical-cultural factors shape new business formation? Using novel data on new business registrations, we document that 75% of the variation in new business formation is explained by time-invariant county-level factors and examine the extent to which such variation is...

Lederman focuses on two objectives in his study: (1) to establish a baseline measurement of the level and geographic distribution of social capital in Argentina, and (2) to identify its empirical determinants.The study's survey questionnaire provides individual-level data on the population's...

Since the Middle Ages the Jews have been engaged primarily in Urban, skilled occupations, such as crafts, trade, finance, and medicine. This distinctive occupational selection occurred between the seventh and the ninth centuries in the Muslim Empire and then it spread to other locations. We...

National life satisfaction is an important way to measure societal well-being and since 2011 has been used to judge the effectiveness of government policy across the world. However, there is a paucity of historical data making limiting long-run comparisons with other data. We construct a new...

Since the Middle Ages the Jews have been engaged primarily in urban, skilled occupations, such as crafts, trade, finance, and medicine. This distinctive occupational selection occurred between the seventh and the ninth centuries in the Muslim Empire and then it spread to other locations. We...

This chapter reviews the growing body of research in economics which concentrates on the education gender gap and its evolution, over time and across countries. The survey first focuses on gender differentials in the historical period that roughly goes from 1850 to the 1940s and documents the...