The Origins of the Division of Labor in Pre-Modern Times

Emilio Depetris-Chauvin and Ömer Özak

No 11554, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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.

Keywords: population diversity; cultural diversity; intra-ethnic diversity; economic specialization; division of labor; comparative development; genetic diversity; linguistic diversity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 F10 F14 J24 N10 O10 O11 O12 O40 O43 O44 Z10 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 73 pages
Date: 2018-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Growth, 2020, 25 (3), 297-340

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11554.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Origins of the Division of Labor in Pre-modern Times (2020)
Working Paper: The Origins of the Division of Labor in Pre-modern Times (2018)
Working Paper: The Origins of the Division of Labor in Pre-modern Times (2018)
Working Paper: The Origins of the Division of Labor in Pre-modern Times (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11554

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().