This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from...

We estimate calories available to workers' households in the USA, Belgium, Britain, France and Germany in 1890/1. We employ data from the United States Commissioner of Labor survey (see Haines, 1979) of workers in key export industries. We estimate that households in the USA, on average, had...

We estimate models of earnings and employment outcomes for a sample of white and nonwhite male immigrants drawn from the Labour Force Survey between 1993 and 2002. Immigrants who arrived to enter the labour market are distinguished from those who arrived to complete their education. Diverse...

Taxation data have been used to create long-run series for the distribution of top incomes in quite a number of countries. Most of these studies have focused on the national experience of individual countries, but we can also learn from cross-country comparisons. Comparative analysis is...

This paper investigates the effect of ethnicity on time spent on overlapped household production, work and leisure activities employing the 2000-2001 UK Time Use Survey. We find that, unconditionally, white females manage to "stretch" their time the most by an additional 233 minutes per day and...

We examine how political participation and political competition are shaped by two class-based extensions of the franchise in 20th-century India. Creating a new dataset of district level political outcomes between 1921 and 1957, we find that the partial franchise extension of 1935 resulted in...

We study Virginia's suffrage from the early 17th century until the American Revolution using an analytical narrative and econometric analysis of unique data on franchise restrictions. First, we hold that suffrage changes reflected labour market dynamics. Indeed, Virginia's liberal institutions...

We model political contestation over school language policy, within linguistic communities where weak property rights protection leads to high decentralized expropriation. We show that improvements in governance institutions that facilitate property rights protection might exacerbate such...

A ban on migration from Suriname, a former Dutch colony, to the Netherlands induced a mass migration and changed the selection of migrants. We exploit this historical episode to study the relationship between the self-selection of migrants and their long-term economic integration over three...

We estimate the effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health at older ages by exploiting variations in malaria exposure risk around birth that resulted from a universal malaria eradication campaign in colonial Taiwan in the early 20th century. We find that malaria exposure...