The paper investigates the determinants of ethnic heterogeneity of the Italian provinces. Among other factors, the paper tests empirically whether gradual improvements in distant communication boost the generation of ethnically heterogeneous provinces. Consequently to easier communication,...

This paper studies the effect of the Spanish Reconquest, a military campaign that aimed to expel the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, on the population of its most important cities. The almost four centuries of Reconquest offer a "quasi-natural" experiment to study the persistence of...

This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of one of the most important high-technology machines in history, the public mechanical clock, on long-run growth in Europe. We avoid endogeneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with an instrument based on the...

In this paper we study the problem of exhaustible resources and renewable resources in a theoretical endogenous growth framework, under various assumptions. In particular, we consider the hypotheses that those two inputs are or are not technologically perfect substitutes of each other. Moreover,...

International trade in capital goods has quantitatively important effects on economic development through capital formation and TFP. Capital goods trade enables poor countries to access more efficient technologies, leading to lower relative prices of capital goods and higher capital-output...

With rapid industrial upgrading along the global value chain of manufactured goods, China has transformed, within one generation, from an impoverished agrarian society to a middle-income nation as well as the largest manufacturing powerhouse in the world. This article identifies the pattern of...