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We exploit differences in the mortality rates faced by European colonialists to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Our argument is that Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. The choice of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470979
Among countries colonized by European powers during the past 500 years those that were relatively rich in 1500 are now relatively poor. We document this reversal using data on urbanization patterns and population density, which, we argue, proxy for economic prosperity. This reversal is...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470258
Thomas Piketty's (2014) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457900
We study how the employment effects of enterprise zones vary with their location, implementation, and administration, based on evidence from California. We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods, coupled with a survey of enterprise zone administrators. Overall, the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463443
Does finance follow the real economy, or the other way around? This paper unites the two competing schools of thought in a general equilibrium framework. Our key result is that there are threshold effects defined by a set of deep institutional parameters (cost of financial intermediation,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464662
the world than many developing countries. A noteworthy feature of this theory is that financial and property rights …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465505
Countries that have pursued distortionary macroeconomic policies, including high inflation, large budget deficits and misaligned exchange rates, appear to have suffered more macroeconomic volatility and also grown more slowly during the postwar period. Does this reflect the causal effect of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012469587
We analyze an economy where managers engage both in the adaptation of technologies from the world frontier and in … investments, but little selection. Closer to the world technology frontier, there is a switch to innovation-based strategy with …. However, societies that cannot switch out of the investment-based strategy fail to converge to the world technology frontier …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012469647
Quality of public institutions has been recognized as a crucial determinant of macroeconomic outcomes. We propose that a country's intrinsic level of openness (due to population size, geography, or exogenous trade opportunities) affects its incentives in investing in better institutions. We...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453661
David Albouy expresses three main concerns about the results in Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001) on the relationship between potential settler mortality and institutions. First, there is a general concern that there are high mortality outliers, potentially affecting this relationship, with...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012461691