We explore the interrelationships between various measures of cultural distance. We first discuss measures of genetic distance, used in the recent economics literature to capture the degree of relatedness between countries. We next describe several classes of measures of linguistic, religious,...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...

We investigate the role of national institutions on subnational African development in a novel framework that accounts both for local geography and cultural-genetic traits. We exploit the fact that the political boundaries in the eve of African independence partitioned more than two hundred...

The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...

In this paper I discuss the effectiveness of foreign aid from a historical perspective. I show that foreign aid is a relatively new concept in economics, and I emphasize the role of exchange rate policies in the foreign aid controversies of the 1970s through 1990s. I show that in the early 1980s...

This paper applies an interpretation of how globalization and governance (G&G) interact with convergence given Cape Verde and Mozambique's particular geographical and historical contexts. We hold that development success under globalization entails, necessarily but not exclusively, positive...

In this paper we explore the popular but controversial idea that developing countries benefit from abandoning policy neutrality vis-a-vis trade, FDI and resource allocation across industries. Are developing countries justified in imposing tariffs, subsidies, and tax breaks that imply distortions...