When the times they’re not a changin’ : essays on the persistent effects of religion, investments, and ancestry on economic, social, and political behaviors at the subnational level.

Summary Political and social behaviors such as political participation, trust in others, collective engagement, health prevention, or attitudes toward contraception can persist for many, many years. This dissertation presents work that explores and rigorously quantifies instances of persistence in these behaviors, using new historical and contemporary data sources. The work presented in this thesis contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it presents a new database on the presence of Christian missionaries in Africa and their investments. This database is unique in that it is fully geocoded and presents data at a very fine level of disaggregation. Second, this work highlights novel channels of persistence in development that are not attributable to institutional differences. Third, by analyzing the intensive margin of diversity, this work also proposes a new way of approaching the question of endogeneity in the study of the economic role of diversity of origins in a society. The first part of this thesis is a work on the persistent effect on the development of missionary activity in sub-Saharan Africa. The second part of this dissertation studies the social conditions that make differences in background a barrier to economic success in the United States.