Warfare, Fiscal Capacity, and Performance

We exploit differences in casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to estimate the impact of fiscal capacity on economic performance. In the past, states fought different amounts of external conflicts, of various lengths and magnitudes. To raise the revenues to wage wars, states made fiscal innovations, which persisted and helped to shape current fiscal institutions. Economic historians claim that greater fiscal capacity was the key long-run institutional change brought about by historical conflicts. Using casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to instrument for current fiscal institutions, we estimate substantial impacts of fiscal capacity on GDP per worker. The results are robust to a broad range of specifications, controls, and sub-samples

Labor markets and cultural values: Evidence from Japanese and American views about caregiving immigrants

One overlooked reason for the persistence of distinct cultural values across rich democracies, we argue, is a country's labor market structure. Parents seeking to position their children for long‐term success would do well to instill values consistent with requirements of the labor market in the country where their children are likely to work. To the extent that labor markets are fluid, as in the United States, parents should teach their children to be resourceful and creative. In countries like Japan with relatively rigid labor markets, where workers have one chance to land a long‐term contract with a leading company, parents instead should instill the values of hard work and respect for authority. We find evidence consistent with this argument in survey experiments about attitudes in the United States and Japan about the desirability of employing immigrants for care work, and what values the immigrant care workers should hold. We also find evidence of indirect norm creation. American and Japanese respondents prefer immigrants—not just caregiving immigrants—whose values align with their country's type of valued human capital

Stable carbon Isotope evidence for neolithic and bronze age crop water management in the eastern mediterranean and southwest asia

In a large study on early crop water management, stable carbon isotope discrimination was determined for 275 charred grain samples from nine archaeological sites, dating primarily to the Neolithic and Bronze Age, from the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia. This has revealed that wheat (Triticum spp.) was regularly grown in wetter conditions than barley (Hordeum sp.), indicating systematic preferential treatment of wheat that may reflect a cultural preference for wheat over barley. Isotopic analysis of pulse crops (Lens culinaris, Pisum sativum and Vicia ervilia) indicates cultivation in highly varied water conditions at some sites, possibly as a result of opportunistic watering practices. The results have also provided evidence for local land-use and changing agricultural practices

The scale, governance, and sustainability of central places in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica

Examinations of the variation and relative successes or failures of past large-scale societies have long involved attempts to reconcile efforts at generalization and the identification of specific factors with explanatory value for regional trajectories. Although historical particulars are critical to understanding individual cases, there are both scholarly and policy rationales for drawing broader implications regarding the growing corpus of cross-cultural data germane to understanding variability in the constitution of human societies, past and present. Archaeologists have recently highlighted how successes and failures in communal-resource management can be studied over the long term through the material record to both engage and enhance transdisciplinary research on cooperation and collective action. In this article we consider frameworks that have been traditionally employed in studies of the rise, diversity, and fall of preindustrial urban aggregations. We suggest that a comparative theoretical perspective that foregrounds collective-action problems, unaligned individual and group interests, and the social mechanisms that promote or hamper cooperation advances our understanding of variability in these early cooperative arrangements. We apply such a perspective to an examination of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican urban centers to demonstrate tendencies for more collective systems to be larger and longer lasting than less collective ones, likely reflecting greater sustainability in the face of the ecological and cultural perturbations specific to the region and era.Accepted manuscrip