Showing 1 - 10 of 236
trade, slavery and early colonialism were linked to human capital formation, but this connection appears to have been … quickly than inner areas. This pattern was affected by French early colonialism and by the reaction of different West African …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012954576
While the direct impact of geographic endowments on prosperity is present in all countries, in former colonies, geography has also affected colonization policies and, therefore, institutional outcomes. Using non-colonized countries as a control group, I re-examine the theories put forward by La...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013315896
Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013315938
This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century. What is the aggregate real rate of return in the economy? Is it higher than the growth rate of the economy and, if so, by how much? Is there a tendency for returns to fall in the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012921279
In this paper I survey and reinterpret the extensive literature on Europe's Great Depression. I argue that Europe could …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013094292
conflicts provide a better explanation than efficiency for the core economic institutions of pre-industrial Europe - serfdom …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013316895
This paper challenges established claims of comparable degrees of market integration in Europe and China on the eve of … from Western Europe we conclude that in terms of market integration the Great Divergence was well under way decades before …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013011330
We claim that a sequential mechanism linking history to development exists: first, history defines the quality of social capital; then, social capital determines the level of corruption; finally, corruption affects economic performance. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of Italian provinces,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013315791
This paper shows that Tabellini’s recent claim to have provided evidence that culture has a causal effect on economic development is unjustified. Tabellini’s claim is based on an instrumental variables analysis in which two instruments are used to identify the supposed causal effect. One of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013315830
Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013317061