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"Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes in the job market). It is, however, the pervasive evidence of the resilience of ethnic and religious traits across generations that motivates a large fraction of the theoretical and empirical literature on cultural transmission. This article reviews the main contributions of models of cultural transmission, from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It presents their implications regarding the long-run population dynamics of cultural traits and cultural heterogeneity, the world's geographical fragmentation by ethic and religious traits, at any given time. Finally, the paper reviews the empirical literature which estimates various properties of cultural transmission mechanisms as well as the population dynamics of specific traits"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

Front Cover -- The Handbook of Historical Economics -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of contributors -- Merger or acquisition? An introduction to The Handbook of Historical Economics -- 1 Historical Economics -- 2 Sources, methods, models, topics -- 2.1 Part 1: The evolution of the discipline -- 2.2 Part 2: Sources, methods, and models -- 2.3 Part 3: Topics -- 3 The challenges of Historical Economics -- 4 Conclusions -- References -- Part 1 What is historical economics -- 1 The economic history of economic history: the evolution of a field in economics -- 1.1 Introduction

In the context of an epidemic, a society is forced to face a system of externalities in consumption and in production. Command economy interventions can support efficient allocations at the cost of severe information requirements. Competitive markets for infection rights (alternatively, Pigouvian taxes) can guarantee efficiency without requiring direct policy interventions on socio-economic activities. We demonstrate that this is the case also with moral hazard, when the infections cannot be associated to the specific activities which originated them. Finally, we extend the analysis to situations where governments have only incomplete information regarding the values of the parameters of the infection or of firms' production.