In this episode we chat with Andrea about his paper​ “The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture”. Andrea finds that the invention and adoption of agriculture were both a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality. In the most affected regions, hunter-gatherers abandoned their traditional nomadism in order to store…

In this episode we chat with Jeanet Bentzen about her paper​ “Pre-reformation roots of the protestant ethic”. Jeanet uses an earlier example, of the Cistercian Catholic Order, to show that religious values did influence productivity and economic performance in England and across Europe. The effect of this historic influence has persisted to today. Paper link:…

In this episode we ask Mara Squicciarini about her paper​ “Devotion and Development: Religiosity, Education, and Economic Progress in 19th-century France”, published in the American Economic Review in 2020. In her study, Mara finds that more religious locations had lower economic development after 1870. Schooling appears to be the key mechanism: more religious areas saw…