’s conjecture that today marked differences in social capital between the North and South of Italy were due to the culture of …

waves of the World Values Survey (1980 to 2005). We thus relate eleven indicators of individual openness to innovation … individual level, examining the relationship between religiosity and a broad set of pro- or anti-innovation attitudes in all five … innovation. …

1950s. Finally, we turn to the determinants of a broad array of development indicators for the year 1960 and for the 1960 …-2000 period. Our main conclusion is that race, rather than political institutions and education policies, is the main force …

colonial rule was to create financial incentives to adopt development policies that encouraged government spending. …

world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of …We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the … institutions 'trumps' everything else. Once institutions are controlled for, measures of geography have at best weak direct effects …

We construct a simple model where political elites may block technological and institutional development, because of a … replaced. Fearing replacement, political elites are unwilling to initiate change, and may even block economic development. We … show that elites are unlikely to block development when there is a high degree of political competition, or when they are …

-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial … we document a positive cross-sectional association between national institutions and regional economic development … regional development. The positive within country effect of pre-colonial institutions also obtains in regions of partitioned …

We investigate the role of national institutions on regional development in a novel framework. We exploit the fact that … correlation between formal national institutions and economic development has to be carefully interpreted. … institutions. Using both a matching-type and a regression discontinuity approach we show that differences in countrywide …