research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and … institutional development. After reporting results from standard growth regressions, I analyze the role of Africa’s peculiar history …

determined by the initial gap. We obtain these results with 2SLS estimates where slavery is used as an instrument for the initial … gap. The excludability of slavery is preliminarily established by instrumenting it with the share of disembarked slaves … initial racial gap in education and that slavery affects growth indirectly through this channel. …

We investigate the impact of slavery on the current performances of the US economy. Over a cross section of counties …, we find that the legacy of slavery does not affect current income per capita, but does affect current income inequality …. Moreover, we find that the impact of slavery on current income inequality is determined by racial inequality. We test three …

fundamentals, and extractive institutions such as slavery affect innovative capacity. However, a large effect associated with being …

confirms that the quality of institutions matters for development, and that history can be used to find suitable instruments. …