Instituto de Economía

Abstract: This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that intra-ethnic diversity had a positive effect on
the division of labor across ethnicities in the pre-modern era. Exploiting a variety of identification
strategies and a novel ethnic level dataset combining geocoded ethnographic, linguistic and genetic
data, it establishes that higher levels of intra-ethnic diversity were conducive to economic specialization
in the pre-modern era. The findings are robust to a host of geographical, institutional, cultural and historical confounders, and suggest that variation in intra-ethnic diversity is the main predictor of the division of labor in pre-modern times.

Keywords: Comparative Development, Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, Intra-Ethnic Diversity, Cultural Diversity, Population Diversity, Genetic Diversity, Linguistic Diversity.

JEL: D74, F10, F14, J24, N10, O10, O11, O12, O40, O43, O44, Z10, Z13