TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Depetris-Chauvin, Emilio
AU  - Özak, Ömer
        TI  - The Origins of the Division of Labor in Pre-Modern Times
        PY  - 2018/May/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 11554
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp11554
        AB  - 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.
        KW  - population diversity
KW  - cultural diversity
KW  - intra-ethnic diversity
KW  - economic specialization
KW  - division of labor
KW  - comparative development
KW  - genetic diversity
KW  - linguistic diversity
        ER  -