Various historical accounts have suggested that the Ottomans' rise helped the Protestant Reformation as well as its offshoots, such as Zwinglianism, Anabaptism, and Calvinism, survive their infancy and mature. Utilizing a comprehensive data set on violent confrontations for the interval between 1401 and 1700 CE, I show that the incidence of military engagements between the Protestant Reformers and the Counter-Reformation forces between the 1520s and 1650s depended negatively on the Ottomans' military activities in Europe. Furthermore, I document that the impact of the Ottomans on Europe went beyond suppressing ecclesiastical conflicts only: at the turn of the sixteenth century, Ottoman conquests lowered the number of all newly initiated conflicts among the Europeans roughly by 25 percent, while they dampened all longer-running feuds by more than 15 percent. The Ottomans' military activities influenced the length of intra-European feuds too, with each Ottoman-European military engagement shortening the duration of intra-European conflicts by more than 50 percent. Thus, while the Protestant Reformation might have benefited from—and perhaps even capitalized on—the Ottoman advances in Europe, the latter seems to have played some role in reducing conflicts within Europe more generally.

Social institutions were often founded by the elite to avoid social upheavals. Institutions helped mitigate the threat of violent social responses to labor-saving innovations. But their organizational forms were influenced by preexisting cultural and social factors. The differences in Chinese and English social institutions explain why England became the first modern economy. Using an English panel of poor relief and social unrest from 1650 to 1830, we document that poor relief was statistically significant in reducing social disorder. Social instability, in turn, negatively influenced innovations, while innovations were positively and significantly related to poor relief.

We develop a transferable utility model of the household in which the marriage market is characterized by (negative or positive) assortative matching, and spousal allocations are determined by premarital investments. We demonstrate that all sharing rules along the assortative order support efficient outcomes both in terms of premarital investments and intra-household allocations. The efficiency of premarital choices and household allocations then enables us to show that, for each couple, the marriage market generates a unique and maritally sustainable sharing rule that is a function of the distribution of premarital endowments and the sex ratios in the market. According to our results, transfers among spouses occur on two margins: premarital investments and intra-marital spousal allocations. Asymmetries in the sex ratios in the marriage markets produce gender differences in premarital investments and consumption that are larger for individuals with small premarital endowments than those with larger endowments. A corollary of these findings is that, when men are in short supply in the marriage markets, women can invest more than men even when the returns to investment are lower or the costs are higher for women.

In the United States, age at first marriage was lowest and the education gap between husbands and wives was highest during the 1950s. The conventional explanation for such a negative correlation is that early marriage leads to earlier and higher fertility, which in turn prevents women from acquiring education. Here, we propose that early marriages enabled couples to overcome credit constraints in education. A model that includes this motive and mechanism can replicate not only the marriage and education patterns observed in the middle of the century in the United States but also the overall trends over the twentieth century.

We trace the evolution of the language of science, religion, and political economy in the centuries leading to the British Industrial Revolution. Using textual analysis of 264,443 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture manifested a belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the languages of science and religion beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. Second, volumes using language at the nexus of science and political economy became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, volumes using industrial language—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the eighteenth century.

We present a model in which investment in schooling generates two kinds of returns: the labor-market return, resulting from higher wages, and a marriage-market return, defined as the impact of schooling on the marital surplus share one can extract. Men and women may have different incentives to invest in schooling because of different market wages or household roles. This asymmetry can yield a mixed equilibrium with some educated individuals marrying uneducated spouses. When the labor-market return to schooling rises, home production demands less time, and the traditional spousal labor division norms weaken, more women may invest in schooling than men.