The debate around the effects of globalization is both widening and deepening. While some nations, like India and China – countries that have consciously built a manufacturing sector for five decades – come across as winners, a large number of smaller Third World nations seem to lose out...

We use new data on the timing of the transition to agriculture, developed by Putterman and Trainor (2006), to test the theory of Diamond (1997) and Olsson and Hibbs (2005) that an earlier transition is reflected in higher incomes today. Our results confirm the theory, even after controlling for...

Individuals' choices of educational content are often shaped by the political economy of government policies that determine the incentives to acquire various skills. We first present a model to show how differences in educational content emerge as an equilibrium outcome of private decisions and...

We construct a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model of the interaction between demography and the economy for six centuries of English history. At the core of the four overlapping generations, rational expectations model is household choice about target number and quality of children, as...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional performance calculated using data on the provision of different areas of public services. In order to address...

Research on economic growth suggests that the era of colonization has had an impact on the levels of economic development of countries around the globe. However, why some countries were colonized early, some late, and others not at all, and what effect these differences have had on current...

We analyze the relationship between pre-colonial warfare and long-run development patterns in India. We construct a new geocoded database of historical interstate conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, from which we compute measures of local exposure to pre-colonial warfare. We document a...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...

What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that...

We test the reproducibility and replicability of Dincecco et al. (2022), which reports a positive relationship between pre-colonial interstate warfare and long-run development patterns across India. Overall, we confirm that all of the study's estimates are computationally reproducible by using...