A recent body of literature has claimed that differences in long-run economic performance within the Americas stem from the different institutional structures established during colonial times. This research tries to find evidence of institutional persistence in Colombia using direct measures of...

This paper summarizes the results of a Global Development Network study, carried on by sixteen multidisciplinary research teams and covering thirty developing countries, under the authors general direction, on the effects of different governance structures on the quality and equity of access in...

Using subnational historical data, this paper establishes the within country persistence of economic activity in the New World over the last half millennium. We construct a data set incorporating measures of pre-colonial population density, new measures of present regional per capita income and...