This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically that geographical variations in the natural return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on the distribution of time preference...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...

The consequences for countries of past foreign rule are the subject of a vast literature across history and the social sciences. This paper constructs a novel measure of past foreign (or minority) rule - the genetic distance of a country's ruling elite in the year 1900 from the country's ethnic...

To explain the process of development historically documented, we consider a model with three economic sectors (agriculture, manufacturing and services) characterized by different productivity gains and by saturation levels in the demands of agricultural and manufactured goods. Our parsimonious...

Inequality between ethnic groups has been shown to be negatively related to GDP, but research on its effect on contemporary economic growth is limited by the availability of comparable data. We compile a novel and comprehensive dataset of harmonized Gini indices on ethnic inequality for...

Tax havens have become a subject of great interest among policymakers, scholars and the general public, and are central to many important current policy debates. This chapter provides an overview of the scholarly literature on the characteristics and origins of tax havens. The earlier...

We investigate how Reconstruction affected Black political participation and socio-economic advancement after the American Civil War. We use the location of federal troops and Freedmen’s Bureau offices to indicate more intensive federal enforcement of civil rights. We find greater political...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

The effects of ethnic geography, i.e., the distribution of ethnic groups across space, on economic, political and social outcomes are not well understood. We develop a novel index of ethnic segregation that takes both ethnic and spatial distances between individuals into account. Importantly, we...