Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration Integration is a common policy used to reduce discrimination, but different types of integration may have different effects. This paper estimates the effects of two types of integration: collaborative and adversarial. I recruited 1,261 young Indian men from...

Rent Sharing and Inclusive Growth The long-run evolution of rent sharing is empirically studied. Based upon a comprehensive and harmonized panel of the top 300 publicly quoted British companies over thirty five years, the paper reports evidence of a significant fall over time in the extent to which firms share...

Robin Hood or Crony Capitalism? Income Inequality Trends in Malaysia (1984-2014) Under Protracted Affirmative Actions In this paper, we document the evolution of income inequality not only at the national level (for the period of 1984-2014) but also by ethnic groups in Malaysia for the period of 2002-2014. To this...

Can Schools Change Religious Attitudes? Evidence from German State Reforms of Compulsory Religious Education.  The question whether churches should have a place in public schools to teach religious education has been the subject of fierce disputes in many countries throughout history. Yet little is known about whether compulsory religious education...

Household Inequality, Entrepreneurial Dynamism and Corporate Financing Economic theories provide conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepreneurial dynamism and corporate financing. To empirically investigate its impact, we construct local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents, home equity, and 1880 farm land. We identify its effects on...

The Time Varying Risk Puzzle Discount rates are not an important driver of financial volatility. I reach this conclusion using a new historical dataset of returns, cashflows and valuations of all major risky asset classes – equity, housing and corporate bonds – across 17 countries from 1870 to today. Variation...

Entrepreneurial Freedom as a driving Institution during the German Industrial Take-off In this paper, I analyze the effect of the abolition of guilds and the introduction of the “Gewerbefreiheit” – entrepreneurial freedom – on economic development during the German industrial take-off. Using the division of the Kingdom of Westphalia and...