It is hard to imagine in the 21st global wine economy, but until 50 years ago Algeria was the largest exporter of wine in the world - and by a wide margin. Between 1880 and 1930 Algerian wine production grew dramatically. Equally spectacular is the decline of Algerian wine production: today,...

We present cross-country evidence that a country's macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country's historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of...