The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies. We explain this pattern in a growth model with land and labour as inputs in production and an endogenously determined property...

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies. We explain this pattern in a growth model with land and labour as inputs in production and an endogenously determined property...

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development, and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies. We explain this pattern in a growth model with land and labor as inputs in production, and an endogenously determined property...

These are the stylized facts of long-run economic and demographic development, as described by Galor and Weil (AER 1999, 2000): Under an initial Malthusian Regime the growth rates of population and per-capita income are both low. Then follows a Post-Malthusian Regime, with higher growth rates of...

In a game-theoretic framework, we analyse the circumstances under which self-enforcing redistribution and power-sharing coalitions can be used to peacefully resolve ethnic conflict. The existence of a pacific equilibrium depends crucially on ethnic diversity (the number of ethnic groups). The...

We propose that per-capita income gaps across US states and Canadian provinces can be explained by university education. Our ordinary least-squares regressions show university education having a robust positive and significant effect on per-capita incomes, when controlling for, e.g. taxes,...

Abstract: The long-run growth model of Galor and Weil (AER 2000) is examined quantitatively. We first give parametric forms to some functions which were only given on general form in the original article. We then choose numerical parameter values in line with calibrations of related long-run...

O'Connell and Zeldes (1993) have shown that the dynamic inefficiency result of a standard gift model is reversed if parents can undersave strategically. I impose an explicit non-negativity constraint on gifts, which - for all numerical examples suggested by O'Connell and Zeldes - alters this...

We set up a model of economic and demographic long-run development, where inequality in income and reproductive success (polygynous mating) plays a central role. The model generates a slow and gradual compression of the income gap between landholders and landless, together with rising levels of...

We explain per-capita income gaps across US states and Canadian provinces by the following chain of causation. Geography determined where Europeans originally settled: in Northeastern USA, along those segments of the Atlantic coast where the climate was neither too hot (the US South), nor too...