This document uses an analytic-interpretive perspective to show the role that institutions and social capital have played in the economic performance of different regions, in particular in the department of Cauca, where historical dependence and the colonial heritage have been important causes...

Genetically modified (“GMO”) corn germinates legal controversies in México. Since 2013, Mexican courts have temporarily suspended GMO corn because it threatens biodiversity. In the Colectividad del Maíz lawsuit, courts have prohibited México from issuing commercial GMO permits while the...

This paper examines the role of human capital persistence in explaining long-term development. We exploit variation induced by a state-sponsored settlement policy that attracted a pool of immigrants with higher levels of schooling to particular regions of Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th...

This paper examines the role of human capital persistence in explaining long-term development. We exploit variation induced by a state-sponsored settlement policy that attracted a pool of immigrants with higher levels of schooling to particular regions of Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th...

This paper quantitatively shows that the 1945 regional differences in the degree of development of manufacturing industry are explained by human capital accumulation prior to industrial development. Human capital accumulation was more intense in the regions with higher presence of non white free...

Recent scholarship claims that extractive colonial institutions explain the lackluster performance of Latin American economies today. We examine forced labor in colonial Peru. We find that while coercive labor institutions led to a drop in the indigenous population until the seventeenth century,...

We explore the impact of encomienda, a forced-labor institution imposed by the Spanish throughout Latin America during three centuries, on long-term development outcomes in Colombia. Despite being a classically extractive institution, municipalities that had encomiendas in 1560 have higher...

This paper examines the role of human capital persistence in explaining long-term development. We exploit variation induced by a state-sponsored settlement policy that attracted a pool of immigrants with higher levels of schooling to particular regions of Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th...

The Spanish colonial empire initially faced a trilemma in the New World. First, they needed to incentivize quasi-private Spanish expeditions to subdue, settle, and secure new territories. Second, they needed labor to develop the new territories and provide a stream of rents for the imperial...

The Spanish encomienda, a colonial forced-labor institution that lasted three centuries, killed many indigenous people and caused others to flee into nomadism. And yet we show that Colombian municipalities with encomiendas in 1560 enjoy better outcomes today across multiple dimensions of...