Title: Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction (with Ana Tur-Prats)

Nearly half of all known languages in the world are under threat of extinction or are already extinct. What are the determinants of language extinction? In this paper, we uncover a relationship between a society’s deep-rooted gender norms and its language’s risk of extinction: languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction compared to those from male-dominant societies. We measure language status and male-dominance using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index (Guarnieri and Tur-Prats, 2023), respectively, for a sample of 4,763 languages in 172 countries. Our results show that the negative relationship between male dominance and language extinction holds even after accounting for fundamental determinants of economic development and societal collapse at the language-group level, such as geography, conflict exposure, climate variability, and historical factors, as well as after the inclusion of country fixed effects. We then investigate the impact of inter-group relationships in the context of colonialism by relating each indigenous group to its colonizer in a dyadic setting. We find that societies with more gender-equal norms than those of their colonizers are significantly more prone to language extinction. Cultural distance in gender norms from the colonizer is a stronger predictor of language extinction than the characteristics of either the colonizer or the indigenous group itself.

Title: Malthusian Migrations (with Romain Wacziarg)

We argue that societies with higher fertility experience increased levels of emigration. During the Age of Mass Migration, persistently high fertility created a large reservoir of surplus labor that could find better opportunities in the New World. We denote such migrations, from labor-abundant to land-abundant regions, as Malthusian migrations. Our results hold in a variety of datasets and specifications, across countries, regions, individuals, and periods. Using linguistic distance from French and twin births as instruments for fertility in crowdsourced genealogical data, we estimate a large effect of fertility on out-migration. Within households, later born children were more likely to migrate as fertility increased, particularly in regions with egalitarian inheritance. We develop a Malthusian model allowing for emigration as a way to escape population pressures, alleviating the negative effects of high fertility and contributing to the emergence of modern economic growth.

Title: Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Long-run Effects of Repeated School Admission Reforms

Authors: Chiaki Moriguchi, Yusuke Narita, Mari Tanaka
Abstract: What happens if selective colleges change their admission policies? We study this question by analyzing the world's first implementation of nationally centralized meritocratic admissions in the early twentieth century. We find a persistent meritocracy-equity tradeoff. Compared to the decentralized system, the centralized system admitted more high-achievers and produced more occupational elites (such as top income earners) decades later in the labor market. This gain came at a distributional cost, however. Meritocratic centralization also increased the number of urban-born elites relative to rural-born ones, undermining equal access to higher education and career advancement.

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