Economists often identify a reduction in the share of agricultural employment as a quantitative indication of the economic growth of nations. But this process did not occur in earnest in the People's Republic of China until the 1980s and to some extent in Japan until well into the mid-20th...

We present the first attempt to construct a long-run historical measure of subjective wellbeing using language corpora from millions of digitized books for the USA, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. While existing measures go back at most to the 1970s, our measure goes back at least 200...

This paper seeks to add to the current debate about financial development and growth in the emerging world by looking at how different financial systems evolve: how and why financial structures change during various stages of development, how best to measure them, and seeing what practical...

What mechanisms account for the long-run differences in economic development across historical settings? Current scholarship has renewed the argument that institutions are essential for promoting market transactions, industrialization, trade and economic growth. In particular, recent work in...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...

Why do inefficient - non-growth enhancing - institutions emerge and persist? This paper develops a simple framework to provide some answers to this question. Political institutions determine the allocation of political power, and economic institutions determine the framework for policy-making...

Assuming that the degree of discretion granted to judges was the main distinguishing feature between common and civil law until the 19th century, we argue that constraining judicial discretion was instrumental in protecting freedom of contract and developing the market order in civil law. We...

The purpose of this paper is neither to present a balance sheet of the pros and cons of the UN and its agencies nor to evaluate their overall performance. Instead, it will ask three fundamental questions about the UN: first, what exactly was the original, core, mission of the UN, and why was it...

Mass deportations and killings of Ottoman Armenians during WWI and the Greek-Turkish population exchange after the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 were the two major events of the early 20th century that permanently changed the ethno-religious landscape of Anatolia. These events marked the end of...

The article presents a new research agenda which links the composition of the British colonial administrations in the mid-20th century with the economic development of former colonies. It presents the first findings taken from the biographical records of over 14,000 senior colonial officers...