Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present in come differences, and, in...

This paper presents a multinomial choice model with social interactions in an incomplete network. Individuals form heterogenous rational expectations about the behavior of peers by taking into account their characteristics and the strength of their ties. We show the network conditions under...

Lauchlin Currie and Albert O. Hirschman worked together as advisers to the National Planning Council in Colombia in the 1950's. Both had little experience in development economics when they arrived, and did not see eye to eye about the functioning and policy recommendations of the Council....

We study the nature of regional inequality in Colombia over the past 200 years. The main empirical fact is that regional inequality has been highly persistent despite the large changes that have taken place and the modernization of the society. We show that regional inequality is highly...