The origins of the division of labor in pre-industrial times
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The origins of the division of labor in pre‑industrial times Emilio Depetris‑Chauvin1 · Ömer Özak2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-industrial societies. Exploiting a variety of identification strategies and a novel ethnic level dataset combining geocoded ethnographic, linguistic and genetic data, it shows that higher levels of intra-ethnic diversity were conducive to economic specialization in the pre-industrial era. The findings are robust to a host of geographical, institutional, cultural and historical confounders, and suggest that variation in intra-ethnic diversity is a key predictor of the division of labor in pre-industrial times. Keywords Comparative development · Division of labor · Economic specialization · Intraethnic diversity · Cultural diversity · Population diversity · Genetic diversity · Linguistic diversity
We wish to thank the editor and two anonymous referees, as well as Javier Birchenall, Klaus Desmet, Oded Galor, Pete Klenow, Stelios Michalopoulos, Dan Millimet, Andrei Shleifer and David Weil, as well as conference participants at Towards Sustained Economic Growth: Geography, Institutions, and Human, Barcelona GSE, 2018; Annual Meetings of the American Economic Association, 2017; NBER Summer Institute—Program on Macroeconomics and Income Distribution, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017; 4th Economic History and Cliometric Lab, PUC Chile, 2016; Montreal Applied Economics Conference, CIREQ, 2017; Zeuthen Workshop, Copenhagen, 2016; Ethnicity and Diversity: Concepts and Measures, Causes and Consequences, Juan March Institute, 2016; Annual Meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), 2015; and seminar participants at Brown University, Clark University, Southern Methodist University, Texas A&M University, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Connecticut, Banco de la República de Colombia, Universidad de los Andes, Universidad del Rosario, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, for useful comments and discussions. Additionally, we thank Anthon Eff for sharing the EA and SCCS datasets, and James Fenske for sharing his mapping of ethnic groups to their historical homelands. Previous versions of the paper circulated under the title “The Origins of the Division of Labor in Pre-modern Times” Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1088 7-020-09179-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Emilio Depetris‑Chauvin [email protected] * Ömer Özak [email protected] 1
Instituto de Economía, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
2
Department of Economics, Southern Methodist University, IZA, Dallas, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Economic Growth
JEL Classification D74 · F10 · F14 · J24 · N10 · O10 · O11 · O12 · O40 · O43 · O44 · Z10 · Z13
1 Introduction At least since Adam Smith, the presence of individuals exc
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