<title>A<sc>bstract</sc> </title> Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson have claimed that the world income distribution underwent a ‘Reversal of Fortune’ from 1500 to the present, whereby formerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor while poor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with...

There has long been an emphasis on the importance of decentralization in providing better quality public services in the developing world. In order to assess the effectiveness of decentralization I examine here the case study of Uganda, which has seen maj

We investigate the relationship between mortality decline and urbanization, which has hitherto been proposed by demographers but has yet to be tested. Using pooled-OLS, fixed effects first differences and long differences we find evidence for a robust negative correlation between crude death...

The importance of pre-colonial history on contemporary African development has become an important field of study within development economics in recent years. In particular (Gennaioli & Rainer, 2007) suggest that pre-colonial political centralization has had an impact on contemporary levels of...

Previously evidence on the pre-modern relationship between wealth and fertility almost entirely relied upon data from Europe. Using British colonial records from early 19th-century India on widow suicides (satis), we find a robust positive relationship between income and fertility.

Nation-building has long been seen as an important focus of post-colonial African governments. However, up until now there has been no empirical analysis of the consequences of nation-building policies. Here we compile an original dataset measuring nine different types of nation-building...