On average, infant mortality rates are lower in more industrialized nations, yet health and mortality worsened during early industrialization in some nations. This study examines the effects of growing manufacturing employment on infant mortality across 274 Indonesian districts from 1985 to...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

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...

Government subsidies to the manufacturing sector are popular in developing countries. This paper studies the long-run effects of a large-scale regional industrialization campaign in China, known as the “Third Front" (TF) construction. Motivated by national defense considerations, the TF...

This paper investigates the origin and evolution of the concept of the industrial district. The idea of industrial district is quite widespread in modern industrial economics and in business studies, with a variety of meanings and typologies. Indeed the real original conceptualisation dates back...

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become common across Southern Africa in the past 20 years. In line with experiences in the rest of the world, they have had at best marginal success. Their essential premise is that it should be more efficient and effective to establish an enclave with...

This article documents the impact of the Brazilian railway network on structural transformation between the late nineteenth and middle twentieth century. We exploit variation induced by geographic location, where municipalities near the least-cost routes were more likely to be connected to...

We theoretically model and empirically investigate a society’s liberalization decision and its impact on income inequality. The motivation is that a blanket conclusion that globalization increases inequality within countries can be misleading. In the paper, the decision of the society rests on...

The research described in this paper is consisting of an indepth study of an important area of the Italian Mezzogiorno: the province of Salerno. The aim of the paper is twofold. The first was to identify, by means of cluster analysis, specialization of industrial areas in this province For that,...