We explain per-capita income gaps across US states and Canadian provinces by the following chain of causation. Geography determined where Europeans originally settled: in Northeastern USA, along those segments of the Atlantic coast where the climate was neither too hot (the US South), nor too...

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development, and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies. We explain this pattern in a growth model with land and labor as inputs in production, and an endogenously determined property...