Spolaore and Wacziarg (2009) have presented evidence supporting a role of genetic distance to the United States as a barrier to economic development. We extend their empirical work by controlling for the share of Europeans and European descendants in the population. We find that the role of...

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...

This paper presents a model where opening the capital account of an economy causes more bankruptcies to take place in the non tradables sector. Non tradable arms must forecast the future state of the economy when investing since the demand for their goods depends on this. In our model the...

We analyze how individual happiness is affected by nine major life events using a panel of British individuals. Our aim is to test the importance of hedonic adaptation in the United Kingdom and to compare our results with equivalent ones obtained in the literature using German data. We also...

In this paper we search for empirical support for the thesis that institutions are a major driver of economic development. While most of the literature uses cross-country regressions (and thus limits itself to the between-country variation in the data), this paper uses pooled OLS, panel...

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 investigate the effects of having children at home on individual happiness. Contrary to much of the literature, we find effects that are positive, large and increasing in the number of children. These effects, however, are contingent on the individual's characteristics. Children make married...

We propose a theoretical analysis of democratization processes in which an elite extends the franchise to the poor when threatened with a revo- lution. The poor could govern without changing the political system by maintaining a continuous revolutionary threat on the elite. Revolutionary...

Institutions, and more specifically private property rights, have come to be seen as a major determinant of long-run economic develop- ment. We evaluate the case for property rights as an explanatory factor of the Industrial Revolution and derive some lessons for the analysis of developing...

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 differentiate between types of colonial experience, and is found to...