Yes.

The Berkeley economics PhD job market candidates are a pretty outstanding lot this year. In an earlier post I wrote about Pamela Jakiela’s exploration of American versus Kenyan norms of reciprocity and sharing using experimental evidence. It is still worth checking out.

Meanwhile, Eric Chaney looks at the economic-growth producing properties of medieval Islamic institutions and casts doubt on the idea that Islam is incompatible with technological and economic progress:

By granting non-Muslims a degree of religious freedom, Muslim law created competition between religions for converts and social standing. Institutionalized tolerance, coupled with initial disadvantages in the number of adherents and sophistication of theological scholarship, encouraged Muslim religious elites to promote the study of logic. The study of logic led, in turn, to the cultivation of the rational sciences. Results suggest that competition and non-religious intellectual enterprise decreased as the societies under Muslim rule became increasingly religiously homogeneous.

How many economists can say that they test their theories “using qualitative evidence from medieval authors, and empirical data on scientific production from a book catalog from the thirteenth century Levant”?

More excellent JMPs (that’s job market papers) to come in future posts…

By the way, there are wikis for both the Political Science and Economics job markets. There are also blogs for job rumors in International Relations and American and Comparative politics.