This paper analyses the connection between legal origins and generalized trust. Based on recent results of institutions and trust research it argues that legal origins and trust are connected via the beliefs of agents. Next, it develops hypotheses about a complex and self-reinforcing causal...

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,...