This article uses new data to analyze the impact on Southeast Asian urbanization of globalization and industrialization in the world economy's core countries between the 1870s and World War II. Dramatic falls in transport costs and free trade, enforced, if necessary, by colonial rule, combined...

This paper argues that increasing average incomes and stagnating levels of happiness, as observed in the United States since the 1970s, do not constitute a paradox. First, we show that the effect of higher incomes has been more than counteracted by changes in other socioeconomic variables,...

This paper offers an integrated analysis of the forces shaping the emergence of the African slave trade over the early modern period. We focus our attention on two questions. First, why most of the increase in the demand for slaves during this period came exclusively from western Europeans....

The effect of mortality reductions on fertility is one of the main mechanisms stressed by the recent growth literature in order to explain demographic transitions. We analyze the empirical relevance of this mechanism based on the experience of all countries since 1960. We distinguish between the...

This paper advances that the share of European descendants in the population is a major determinant of democracy in former colonial countries. We test this hypothesis using cross-section and panel regressions with 60 developing and developed countries that were once colonies. We find that the...

We propose a theoretical analysis of democratization processes in which an elite extends the franchise to the poor when threatened with a revolution. The poor could govern without changing the political system by maintaining a continuous revolutionary threat on the elite. Revolutionary threats,...