Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...

Hopes for development aid remain high among Western politicians and pundits, but the evidence is depressing. Foreign aid has on average probably no effect on long-run growth. To understand the failure of many development projects, we need a deeper consideration of the failure of top-down...

We provide evidence that increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War, was used to create a larger foreign market for American products. Following CIA interventions, imports from the US increased dramatically, while total exports to the US were unaffected....

A large research program in economics has established a persuasive link between institutions and economic development. But what does this imply for development policymaking? Can a political leader or aid agency seeking to promote development readily change institutions? This article starts off...

The new growth literature, using both endogenous growth and neoclassical models, has generated strong claims for the effect of national policies on economic growth. Empirical work on policies and growth has tended to confirm these claims. This paper casts doubt on this claim for strong effects...

Previous literature suggests that leaders matter for growth in general. This paper asks which leaders matter and develops a methodology to estimate the growth contribution of individual leaders and calculate its precision. The findings show that few leaders have statistically significant...

Structural adjustment, as measured by the number of adjustment loans from the IMF and World Bank, reduces the growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Growth does reduce poverty, but the author find no evidence for a direct effect of structural adjustment on growth. Instead, the poor benefit less...