Italy’s economic growth over its 150 years of unified history did not occur at a steady pace nor was it balanced across sectors. Relying on an entirely new input (labour and capital) database by us built and presented in the Appendix, together with new Banca d’Italia estimates of GDP by...

We investigate the role of national institutions on subnational African development in a novel framework that accounts both for local geography and cultural-genetic traits. We exploit the fact that the political boundaries in the eve of African independence partitioned more than two hundred...

Substantial evidence suggests that countries or regions with stronger trade linkages tend to have business cycles that are more synchronized. The standard international business cycle framework cannot replicate this nding. In this paper, we study a multi-country model of international trade with...

We provide experimental evidence that subjects blame others based on events they are not responsible for. In our experiment an agent chooses between a lottery and a safe asset; payment from the chosen option goes to a principal who then decides how much to allocate between the agent and a third...

We show that the welfare of a countrys in…nitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a …rst order, by total factor productivity (TFP) and by the capital stock per capita. These variables su¢ ce to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare di¤erences across...

The nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of capitalism; the twentieth century saw the bloodiest wars in history. Is there a connection? The paper reviews the literature and evidence. It considers first whether capitalism has lowered the cost of war; then, whether capitalism has shown a...

If voters of different countries adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms, the country leaders may fi…nd it impossible to agree on efficient policies especially in hard times. The conformity constraint -political leaders unwillingness or impossibility to depart from these norms -...

Field studies of conflict report cycles of mutual revenge between groups, often linked to perceptions of intergroup injustice. We test the hypothesis that people are predisposed to reciprocate against groups. In a computerized laboratory experiment, subjects who were harmed by a partner’s...

We analyze the relationship between offshoring and the onshore workforce composition in German multinational enterprises (MNEs), using plant data that allow us to discern tasks, occupations, and workforce skills. Offshoring is associated with a statistically significant shift towards more...

We investigate the theoretical relationship between wage concentration and international market integration. Access to imported varieties lowers the cost of intermediate inputs (“machines”) used to carry out production tasks, causing workers with different comparative abilities to be sorted...