Hans-Joachim Voth

From clothes and hairstyles to fashion accessories, humans use a range of stylistic elements to express themselves. We present new methods to use images as a high-frequency, granular source for the analysis of cultural change. We systematically exploit data from more than 14 million high school yearbook pictures of graduating US seniors to analyze persistence and change in style.

We provide theory and evidence on the contribution of slavery wealth to Britain’s economic development prior to the abolition of slavery in 1833. We combine data on individual slaveholders from compensation records, an exogenous source of variation in slavery wealth from weather-induced shocks to mortality of the enslaved during the middle passage, and a quantitative spatial model.

We study the ability of a firm to elicit repeated effort from workers by creating a “rat race” of hierarchical status-based incentives. We examine performance using data on over 5,000 German air force pilots during World War II. Pilots’ effort is hard to monitor; motivation is key to success. Fighter pilot performance increases markedly as they approach eligibility for a medal before falling off upon receipt of the award.

Mass media often persuades; it can also expand the machinery of repression. We study radio network expansion and political persecution in Stalin’s Soviet Union, in the decades leading up to the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937–38. Greater radio coverage systematically intensified political repression: a one-standard-deviation increase in signal strength is associated with roughly 40 percent more arrests and a 20 percent rise in the execution share among those arrested, with effects that grew over time.

Do occupational dynasties reflect the intergenerational transmission of skills or nepotism? We use detailed data on the fighting record of the 18th century Royal Navy to show that sons of navy officers are markedly more successful than non-legacies, outperforming in terms of enemy captures by a third. This performance differential is not due to better equipment or more favorable assignments, and also holds for those whose patron has passed away.

What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,300 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures, sources of meaning, and overall life satisfaction.

Can weakened religiosity lead to the rise of totalitarianism? The Nazi Party set itself up as a political religion, emphasizing redemption, sacrifice, rituals, and communal spirit. This had a major impact on its success: Where the Christian Church only had shallow roots, the Nazis received higher electoral support and saw more party entry.

Why do lenders extend credit to sovereigns despite many defaults in the past, often by the same borrowers? We examine one famous historical case — the debts and defaults of Philip II of Spain. We present the earliest reconstruction of full fiscal accounts in history, and show that Philip’s debts were sustainable — and that lending to him despite the defaults was profitable. What made lending to a powerful monarch possible was a particular network structure amongst lenders — effectively a coalition of Genoese bankers who imposed moratoria on the king whenever he defaulted.

Between 1700 and 1830, the British economy was transformed. A famous body of work attributes the rise of the first industrial nation to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and associated institutional improvements. We examine the joint effects of two other factors — fiscal repression and war finance. In combination, these made it impossible for the financial system to perform its most basic function: transferring resources from people with funds to those with ideas. Using evidence from the Hoare’s Bank archive, we document how government intervention in financial markets slowed down the Industrial Revolution.

Did working hours increase during the Industrial Revolution? I assemble new evidence on working patterns, derived from witnesses’ accounts in the Old Bailey Session papers. Hours worked increased substantially, both because old holidays fell into disuse and because Blue Monday largely disappeared. One important implication is that growth after 1770 was driven by rising labor input — the role of productivity growth is correspondingly lower.