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...

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...

One feature of adjustment loans that has been often overlooked in their evaluation is their frequent repetition to the same country, with such extremes as the 30 IMF and World Bank adjustment loans to Argentina over 1980-99 or the 26 adjustment loans to Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. The rate of...

The classic narrative of economic development - poor countries are caught in poverty traps, out of which they need a Big Push involving increased aid and investment, leading to a takeoff in per capita income - has been very influential in development economics since the 1950s. This was the...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000, AER) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970 -93 to 1970 -97, as well as filling in missing data for the...

Recent literature suggests that long-run averages of growth and inflation are only weakly correlated and such correlation is not robust to exclusion of extreme inflation observations; inclusion of time series panel data has improved matters, but an aggregate parametric approach remains...

We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the...

The worldwide slowdown in growth after 1975 played an important role in the debt crisis of the middle-income countries in the 1980s, the crisis of the heavily indebted poor countries in the 1980s and 1990s, and the increased public debt burden of the industrial countries in the 1980s and...