Path Dependence and Occupations

Path dependence in occupations refers to the observed occupational distribution in a population or in a sub-population at a point in time that depends on changes that occurred years or centuries earlier. Path dependence in occupations can be the outcome of the cumulative concentration of certain productive activities in specific regions over time, it can emerge through the effect of parental income or wealth on offspring’s occupations and incomes, or it can be the outcome of group effects. Some historical cases are selected to illustrate the various mechanisms through which path dependence in occupations can emerge or disappear.path dependence, occupational structure, social norms, trade diasporas, Jewish occupational selection, feminization of occupations, African-American occupational transition

Are there Increasing Returns in Marriage Markets?

The returns to scale of marriage markets have important behavioral and welfare consequences. It is quantitatively difficult to estimate the returns to scale because, due to endogenous migration, the marriage market size is endogenous. This paper addresses the endogeneity in two ways. First, it estimates the degree of returns to scale in U.S. marriage markets using the 2000 census. Given that in the United States people move to cities to find marriage partners and, therefore, the size of the marriage market is endogenous, we instrument the current size of a cohort in the marriage market with the size of that cohort twenty years earlier. Second, it estimates city scale effects in two societies---early Renaissance Tuscany and pre-reform China---where there was little internal mobility, and thus, the size of the marriage market can be considered exogenous. The main finding is that in all three societies, there is no evidence of increasing returns to scale in marriage markets, whereas the hypothesis of constant returns to scale cannot be rejected. This is true when looking at marriage odds ratios, total gains to marriage, and the quality of marital match. Given the different characteristics of the three societies in terms of population size, time period, economic structure, and social norms characterizing the marriage market, the similarity and precision of the estimates for returns to scale parameters is remarkable.Increasing returns, marriage market, United States, China, Renaissance Tuscany

From Farmers to Merchants, Voluntary Conversion and Diaspora: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish History

From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring any Jewish father to educate his children. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this exogenous change in the religious and social norm had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history. First, the high individual and community cost of educating children in subsistence farming economies (2nd to 7th centuries) prompted voluntary conversions, which account for a large share of the reduction in the size of the Jewish population from about 4.5 million to 1.2 million. Second, the Jewish farmers who invested in education, gained the comparative advantage and incentive to enter skilled occupations during the vast urbanization in the newly developed Muslim Empire (7th and 8th centuries) and they actually did select themselves into these occupations. Third, as merchants the Jews invested even more in education–a pre-condition for the extensive mailing network and common court system that endowed them with trading skills demanded all over the world. Fourth, the Jews generated a voluntary diaspora by migrating within the Muslim Empire, and later to western Europe where they were invited to settle as high skill intermediaries by local rulers. By 1200, the Jews were living in hundreds of towns from England and Spain in the West to China and India in the East. Fifth, the majority of world Jewry (about one million) lived in the Near East when the Mongol invasions in the 1250s brought this region back to a subsistence farming economy in which many Jews found it difficult to enforce the religious norm regarding education, and hence, voluntarily converted, exactly as it had happened centuries earlier.social norms, religion, human capital, Jewish economic and demographic history, occupational choice, migration.

Why Dowries?

Parents transfer wealth to their children in many ways. The dowry is distinctive because it is a large transfer made to a daughter at the time of her marriage. In an insightful essay, Goody (1973) proposed that the dowry is a premortem inheritance to the bride. A daughter obtains a wealth transfer from her parents as her dowry whereas a son obtains his as a bequest. His observation has been confirmed in different dotal (dowry giving) societies. We develop a theory of dowries that explains his observation. Our work builds on Becker's seminal research on marriage markets and the research program on economics of the family (Rosenzweig and Stark 1997). We argue that in virilocal societies, where married daughters leave the parental home and their married brothers do not, altruistic parents use dowries and bequests to solve a free riding problem between siblings. In virilocal societies, married sons continue to work with the family assets after their marriage. If married daughters share in the parents' bequests, the sons will not get the full benefits of their efforts in extending the family wealth. Thus they will supply too little effort. In order to mitigate this free riding problem, altruistic parents give bequests to sons and lump sum payments to daughters. The model predicts that dowry contracts, which may be complicated, should not contain claims on shares of income generated with the family assets. A theory of dowry has to explain its disappearance in previously dotal societies. As the labor market becomes more developed, as the demand for different types of workers grow, children are less likely to work in the same occupation as their parents. They are also less likely to work for or live with their families. The use of bequests to align work incentives within the family becomes less important. Since it is costly to pay a dowry, the demand for dowry (within the family) will fall as the need to use bequests exclusively for sons to align work incentives falls. Instead of the dowry, parents will transfer wealth to both their daughters and sons as bequests. So the development of labor markets will be important in reducing the role of dowries. We test our model of dowries with two types of evidence. The primary source of evidence comes from notarial deeds and the Florentine Catasto (census) of 1427 housed at the State Archives of Florence. The deeds record marriages in the Tuscan town of Cortona and fortyfour villages in its countryside between 1415 and 1436. The Florentine Catasto of 1427 supplied information on the paternal households of the brides and grooms. The model's prediction on contractual form is matched against the terms found in the marriage contracts. We merge the value of dowries from the marriage contracts to family characteristics found in the Catasto to test the model's predictions on family demographics and dowry values. Dotal marriages in medieval Cortona support the model presented here. In general, there is little data on the decline of dowries in a society due to the large time span of historical data needed to track its decline. A singular exception is the insightful study by Nazzari (1991) who studied the decline of dowries in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 1600 to 1900. Although her theory is different from ours, the factors which Nazzari considered as responsible for the decline of dowries there are consistent with our model.

Recurrence in node-negative advanced gastric cancer: Novel findings from an in-depth pathological analysis of prognostic factors from a multicentric series

AIM: To analyze the clinicopathological characteristics of patients with both node-negative gastric carcinoma and diagnosis of recurrence during follow-up. METHODS: We enrolled 41 patients treated with curative gastrectomy for pT2-4aN0 gastric carcinoma between 1992 and 2010, who developed recurrence (Group 1). We retrospectively selected this group from the prospectively collected database of 4 centers belonging to the Italian Research Group for Gastric Cancer, and compared them with 437 pT2-4aN0 patients without recurrence (Group 2). We analyzed lymphatic embolization, microvascular infiltration, perineural infiltration, and immunohistochemical determination of p53, Ki67, and HER2 in Group 1 and in a subgroup of Group 2 (Group 2bis) of 41 cases matched with Group 1 according to demographic and pathological characteristics. RESULTS: T4a stage and diffuse histotype were associated with recurrence in the group of pN0 patients. In-depth pathological analysis of two homogenous groups of pN0 patients, with and without recurrence during longterm follow-up (groups 1 and 2bis), revealed two striking patterns: lymphatic embolization and perineural infiltration (two parameters that pathologists can easily report), and p53 and Ki67, represent significant factors for recurrence. CONCLUSION: The reported pathological features should be considered predictive factors for recurrence and could be useful to stratify node-negative gastric cancer patients for adjuvant treatment and tailored follow-up

Clash of Civilizations: Impact of Culture on Militarized Interstate Dispute

Abstract Huntington (1993a, 1993b, 1998, 2000) argued that the fundamental source of con ‡ict in the post-Cold War world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic, but the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of con ‡ict will be cultural and religious; as such, the primary axis of con‡ict in the future will be along civilizational lines. To that end, in addition to confronting several of Huntington's hypotheses we scrutinize the impact of culture on militarized interstate disputes and test whether countries that belong to di¤erent civilizations tend to be more involved in con ‡ict than countries that belong to the same civilization. We show that over the period of 1816-2001 civilizational dissimilarity in a dyad increases the probability of con ‡ict calculated at the means of the variables by up to 62.8 percentage points. More strikingly, even after controlling for geographic, political, military and economic factors, being part of di¤erent civilizations in the post-Cold War period brings about 71.2 percentage points higher con ‡ict probability than belonging to the same civilization while it reduces the probability of con ‡ict by 25.7 percentage points during the Cold War. JEL Classi…cation: D74, N40, N70, Z10