Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...

We present evidence that measures of quot;social cohesion,quot; such as income inequality and ethnic fractionalization, endogenously determine institutional quality, which in turn casually determines growth

After excluding countries with high-inflation crises - periods when annual inflation is above 40 percent - the data reveal no evidence of a consistent relationship between growth and inflation, at any frequency. But growth does tend to fall sharply during discrete crises of high inflation and to...

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the effect of growth on poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but I find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less from...

Does economic development depend on geographic endowments like temperate instead of tropical location, the ecological conditions shaping diseases, or an environment good for grains or certain cash crops? Or do these endowments of tropics, germs, and crops affect economic development only through...