We investigate the role of deeply-rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a historical perspective on the reform process initiated in Tanzania in 1986, and deepened in 1996. In order to do this I concentrate mostly on the period spanning from 1967, when the Arusha Declaration was adopted by the official political party the TANU,...

Even though Australia has experienced frequent and large commodity export price shocks like the Third World, it seems to have dealt with the volatility better. Why? This paper explores Australian terms of trade volatility since 1901. It identifies two major price shock episodes before the recent...

We investigate the role of national institutions on subnational African development in a novel framework that accounts both for local geography and cultural-genetic traits. We exploit the fact that the political boundaries in the eve of African independence partitioned more than two hundred...

This study is an attempt to evaluate the effects of product and labour market regulations on industry productivity through their various impacts on changes in production prices and wages. In a first stage, the estimation of a regression equation on an industry*country panel, with controls for...

There remains considerable debate in both the theoretical and empirical literature about the differences in the cyclical dynamics of firms by firm size. Some have hypothesized that small firms are more sensitive to cycles while others have posited that larger firms are more sensitive....

We present estimates of 4 and 8 firm concentration ratios by industry and in weighted aggregate form for the manufacturing sector for Chinese enterprises for 2002 and 2007. These are then compared to available estimates for the same years and industrial classification for the US. These...