Does economic development depend on geographic endowments like temperate instead of tropical location, the ecological conditions shaping diseases, or an environment good for grains or certain cash crops? Or do these endowments of tropics, germs, and crops affect economic development only through...

An important challenge to economists is to explain how financial contracts and institutions affect economic growth while simultaneously explaining how economic development elicits the creation and modification of an economy's financial structure. This paper addresses one side of this inherently...