In what sense are institutions a deep determinant of growth? In this paper, we address this question by examining the relationship between city growth and institutional reform in 19th century Germany, when some cities experienced deep institutional reform as a result of French rule. Employing an...

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...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region's lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there has...

This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in...

We study whether the spatial distribution of natural resources across different ethnic groups within countries impede spatial inequality, national economic performance, and the incidence of armed conflict. By providing a theoretical rent-seeking model and analysing a set of geocoded data for...

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 generate and analyze data pertinent to the role of caselaw in England's economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then...

This is Part 2 of a two-part paper which surveys the historical evidence on the role of institutions in economic growth. The paper provides a critical scrutiny of a number of stylized facts widely accepted in the growth literature. It shows that private-order institutions have not historically...