The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of
proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in …

Parenting decisions are among the most consequential choices that people make
throughout their lives. Starting with the work of pioneers such as Gary Becker, economists …

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes
a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the …

This article studies the global variation in economic preferences. For this purpose, we
present the Global Preference Survey (GPS), an experimentally validated survey data set of …

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on
the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps …

During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution
and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been …

The presence of a westward‐moving frontier of settlement shaped early US history. In 1893,
the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered …

A growing body of empirical work measuring different types of cultural traits has shown that
culture matters for a variety of economic outcomes. This paper focuses on one specific …

This research explores the origins of observed differences in time preference across
countries and regions. Exploiting a natural experiment associated with the expansion of …

Is persistence a myth or a fact? In this chapter, I survey the literature on persistence in
historical economics. I first clarify some of the concepts, before presenting a classification of …