Using state-level data from the United States, we find that differences in colonial legal institutions affect the current quality of state legal institutions. These differences in colonial legal institutions arose because some states were settled by Great Britain, a common law country, and other...

Several important studies of institutions assume that the quality of institutions is persistent following some formative historic event. The assumption of institutional persistence, however, begs the question of how these institutions persisted. To better understand this issue, this paper...

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This paper demonstrates that two initial conditions—having been settled by a country with a civil-law legal system (France, Spain, or Mexico) and membership in the Confederacy during the Civil War—have had lasting effects on state courts in the United States. We find that states initially...

Using state-level data from the United States, we find that differences in colonial legal institutions have affected the current quality of state legal institutions. These differences in colonial legal institutions arose because some states were settled by Great Britain, a common law country,...