Origins and Consequences of Lanquage Structures

Oded Galor, Ömer Özak and Assaf Sarid

No 2016-7, Working Papers from Brown University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in agricultural productivity, and more hierarchical society, are at the root of existing cross-language variations in the presence of the future tense, grammatical gender, and politeness distinctions. Moreover, the research suggests that while language structures have largely reflected the coding of past human experience and in particular the range of ancestral cultural traits in society, they independently affected human behavior and economic outcomes.

Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-his
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bro:econwp:2016-7

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