Recent studies have highlighted the importance of Africa's history of slave exporting to its current economic development. In this paper I show that differences in investment in education may be one of the channels through which that history has affected current development. I combine data on...

The Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative has been one of the primary avenues for delivering debt relief to developing countries in the past decade. However, the performance of countries in the HIPC programme has been vastly heterogeneous with some countries reaching completion point...

We investigate in this paper whether the exogenous version of the modernisation hypothesis holds in South America, or whether democracy needs development for its own consolidation. We use a sample of all nine countries that re-democratised in the last thirty years or so and the data sets cover...

Recent shifts in the global debt relief architecture has meant that countries with superior institutions are often rewarded with increasinf aid and debt relied, an incentive for debtor countries to strategically improve their institutions prior to seeking debt relief. This paper contributes to...