The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the "sending" countries in Africa, with attention to their economic,...

Conventional wisdom about the relationship between income distribution and economicdevelopment has been subjected to dramatic transformations in the past century. Whileclassical economists advanced the hypothesis that inequality is beneficial for growth, theneoclassical paradigm dismissed the...

This paper derives the conditions under which fitness-reducing alleles can survive in a longrun stationary equilibrium for a trading population, extending the results in Saint-Paul (2002) for arbitrary systems of sexual reproduction

This paper develops a model in which market structure is determined endogenously by the choice of intermediation mode. We consider two representative business modes of intermediation that are widely used in real-life markets: one is a middleman mode where an intermediary holds inventories which...

In this paper, we investigate the long-run effects of World War II on socio-economic status(SES) and health of older individuals in Europe. Physical and psychological childhood eventsare important predictors for labor market and health outcomes in adult life, but studies thatquantify these...

Does fractionalization change over time? If so, are there any substantial implications foreconomic performance? To answer such questions, we construct a new panel data set withfractionalization measures for 26 former communist countries covering the period from 1989to 2002...

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...

Progress in narrowing black-white earnings differences has been far from continuous, with some of the apparent progress resulting from labor force withdrawal among lower-skilled African Americans. This paper builds on prior research and documents racial and ethnic differences in male earnings...

This paper provides a documentation of the ifo Prussian Economic History Database (iPEHD), a county-level database covering a rich collection of variables for 19th-century Prussia. The Royal Prussian Statistical Office collected these data in several censuses over the years 1816-1901, with much...

In the 1980s, many U.S. cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rates of African-American men. Black...