We exploit employment data from 10,528 parishes across nineteenth century England and Wales and find that a one standard deviation increase in finance employment increases the annualized growth rate of secondary labour by 0.8 percentage points. An endogenous growth model with finance and...

This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central actor in modern growth theory - the engineer. It collects cross-country and state level data on the labor share of engineers for the Americas, and county level data on engineering and patenting for the US during...

We use census data to show that structural transformation reflects a fundamental reallocation of labor from goods to services, instead of a relabelling that occurs when goods-producing firms outsource their in-house service production. The novelty of our approach is that it categorizes labor by...

This study seeks to determine the extent to which the former communist states of Central and South-West Asia are infected by the Dutch Disease. We take a detailed look at the functioning of the transmission mechanism of the Dutch Disease, i.e. the chains that run from commodity prices to real...

Beyond years of schooling, educational content can play an important role in the process of economic development. Individuals' choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first present...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady .ow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...

This research establishes that the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrastate conflicts in the modern era reflect the long shadow of prehistory. Exploiting variations across national populations, it demonstrates that genetic diversity, as determined predominantly during the...

We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of foreign aid on economic growth in a sample of 96 recipient countries over the 1974-2009 period. We interact donor government fractionalization with a recipient country’s probability of receiving aid. The results show that fractionalization...

What is the long run impact on development from differences in subsistence strategies during pre-industrial times? Whereas this question has been explored from the point of view of agriculture, remarkably little attention has been paid to the complementary strategy of relying on marine...

By merging individual data on valuable patents granted in Prussia in the late nineteenth century with county level information on literacy and income tax revenues we show that increases in the stock of human capital not only improved workers' productivity but also accelerated innovative...