Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/180572 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 11554
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that intra-ethnic diversity had a positive effect on the division of labor across ethnicities in the pre-modern era. Exploiting a variety of identification strategies and a novel ethnic level dataset combining geocoded ethnographic, linguistic and genetic data, it establishes that higher levels of intra-ethnic diversity were conducive to economic specialization in the pre-modern era. The findings are robust to a host of geographical, institutional, cultural and historical confounders, and suggest that variation in intra-ethnic diversity is the main predictor of the division of labor in pre-modern times.
Subjects: 
comparative development
division of labor
economic specialization
intra-ethnic diversity
cultural diversity
population diversity
genetic diversity
linguistic diversity
JEL: 
D74
F10
F14
J24
N10
O10
O11
O12
O40
O43
O44
Z10
Z13
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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