Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by the coastal provinces. We decomposed the location dummies in provincial growth regressions to obtain estimates of the effects of geography and policy on provincial growth rates in 1996-99. Their...

We study the long run effects of one of the most ambitious regional development programs in U.S. history: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Using as controls authorities that were proposed but never approved by Congress, we find that the TVA led to large gains in agricultural employment that...

How effective are policies aimed at integrating isolated regions? We answer this question in the context of a highway system in one of the poorest regions in the United States. With construction starting in 1965, the Appalachian Development Highway System ultimately consisted of over 2,500...

Following the rationale for regional redistribution programs described in the official documents of the European Union, this paper studies a very simple multi-country model built around two regions: a core and a periphery. Technological spill-overs link firms' productivity in each of the two...

Soon after beginning operations, the Federal Reserve established a nationwide network for collecting information about the economy. In 1919, the Fed began tabulating data by about retail sales, which it viewed as a fundamental measure of consumption. From 1920 until 1929, the Federal Reserve...

Changes in technologies for reproducing and redistributing digital goods (e.g., music, movies, software, books) have dramatically affected profitability of these goods, and raised concerns for future development of socially valuable digital products. However, broader illegitimate distribution of...

This paper documents industrial output and labor productivity growth around the poor periphery 1870-1940 (Latin America, the European periphery, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia). Intensive and extensive industrial growth accelerated there over these seven critical...

We find that over the period 1950-1990, US states absorbed increases in the supply of schooling due to tighter compulsory schooling and child labor laws mostly through within-industry increases in the schooling intensity of production. Shifts in the industry composition towards more...

We employ the conjectural approach to estimate the growth of GDP per capita for the colonies and states of the mid-Atlantic region (Del., NJ, NY and Penn). In contrast to previous studies of the region's growth that relied heavily on the performance of the export sector, the conjectural method...

We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization...