This paper advances that the share of European descendants in the population is a major determinant of democracy in former colo- nial countries. We test this hypothesis using cross-section and panel regressions with 60 developing and developed countries that were once colonies. We …nd that the...

This paper argues that corruption in developing countries has deep historical roots; going all the way back to the characteristics of their colonial experience. The degree of European settlement during colonial times is used to di¤erentiate between types of colonial experience, and is found to...

We study the importance of the local elite as a determinant of the effectiveness of foreign aid in developing countries. An "extractive" elite will misuse aid ?ows, an issue that is probably as old as foreign aid itself. We proxy for the existence of an "extractive" elite by using an...

This paper studies the apparent inconsistency between the evolution of GDP per capita and real wages in pre-industrial Europe. We show that these two measures will diverge when any of the three following factors are present: changes in income distribution, changes in labour supply per capita and...

Two mechanisms have attracted considerable attention from researchers studying the effects of income on happiness: adaptation and social comparison. In most empirical studies these two mechanisms have been considered separately. This paper contributes to the literature by jointly testing for the...

We study the importance of the local elite as a determinant of the effectiveness of foreign aid in developing countries. The local elite serves as an intermediary between aid donors and aid recipients through its control of the government and major firms. The likelihood of misusing aid is large...

The aim of this paper is to o¤er a more appropriate test of Kuznets inverted-Uhypothesis than the one routinely used in the literature and implement it using panel and country-by-country regressions. We explore whether countries experiencing large shifts in population from the agri-...