Purpose The article examines Sheikh Ahmad Khatib Al-Minangkabauwi's initial concept of paper money, which in the early 20th century wrote Risala Raf'u Al-Iltibas. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a qualitative approach based on the critical extraction analysis that can reveal a set of...

Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children...

The assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin’s little tramp...

This paper was due to be presented to the 2013 conference of the World Association for Political Economy, in Florianopolis, Brasil. In the event, the author was unable to attend. The paper summarises the main conclusions of ten years of research into the Creative Industries in London and the UK,...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper's motivating evidence we also uncover...

Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a society's oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine...

Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children...

The frequency distribution of personal given names offers important evidence about the information economy. This paper presents data on the popularity of the most frequent personal given names (first names) in the UK over the past millennium. The popularity of a name is its frequency relative to...

We combine unsupervised machine-learning and econometric methods to examine cultural change in 16th- and 17th-century England. A machine-learning digest synthesizes the content of 57,863 texts comprising 83 million words into 110 topics. The topics include the expected, such as Natural...

The Israeli Ultra-Orthodox population doubles each seventeen years. With 60% of prime-aged males attending Yeshiva rather than working, that community is rapidly outgrowing its resources. Why do fathers with families in poverty choose Yeshiva over work? Draft deferments subsidize Yeshiva...