This paper will focus on the strangely pervasive view – especially in western occult circles and in South Asia– that Jesus travelled to India and Tibet during his “lost years” between his Bar Mitzvah and his preaching in Palestine. While there, it was argued, he incorporated the fundamentals of Hinduism and Buddhism into his teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount. The implication of this argument was that Western civilisation was unable to forge an ethics of compassion and a doctrine of non-violence without the help of “Eastern Wisdom.”

This paper studies the relationship between economic prosperity and religion through the lens of social norms. In a social equilibrium framework, where a society is one realization of many possible equilibria, we model how the Albanian government increased female participation in education and employment by changing the social equilibrium through credibly committing to communist ideals.

Can competition or cooperation for economic gain affect people's social perceptions of others? This paper experimentally examines this possible link from the economic to the social realm. Subjects engage in a task facing either a tournament or a cooperative pay scheme, after which subjects are asked their social perceptions of their counterparts in the task -- how similar they are and how much they have in common. The pay schemes do not affect answers to the subjective similarity measure but significantly influence subjects' reports of commonality.

There is increasing evidence of the importance of tailoring development interventions to the local context. We implement an RCT in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there is variation in the presence of age sets, a mode of social organization that creates cohesive groups of young men who provide a check on the power of the older political elite. We provide villages chiefs with cash to purchase health products and form oversight committees. Some villages are randomly assigned to form a diverse committee and other villages are randomly assigned to form a young male committee.

Do liberal societies cultivate and sustain the social norms and other preferences required to perpetuate their basic institutions in the long run? To explore the dynamic stability of liberalism as a culture-institutions coevolutionary process, we measure the value of personal autonomy and aversion to being controlled by others, among East Germans raised under Communist rule and East Germans raised in liberal Germany.

This paper investigates the effect of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in European democratic host countries on support for democracy in African migrants’ origin communities. We propose a novel methodology to estimate migration stocks from sub-national areas of origin to any possible country in the world based on Google trends data. We use these data alongside measures of anti-immigrant sentiment at destination to study origin communities exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment.

This study investigates the short-, medium-, and long-term impacts of state censorship on knowledge production, focusing on the largest book banning in Chinese history, triggered by the creation of the Siku Quanshu (Complete Library in Four Sections) during 1772–1783. By analyzing publication data of over 161,000 books spanning from the 1660s to the 1940s, we find that categories subjected to more severe bans experienced a significant decline in publications in the decades following the bans (1780s to 1840s).