This paper evaluates the welfare consequences of implementing intellectual property rights in developing countries. The protection of intellectual property in poor countries promises to increase world innovation, but this would not come without costs. Higher prices for consumers in that part of...

This article uses new data to analyze the impact on Southeast Asian urbanization of globalization and industrialization in the world economy's core countries between the 1870s and World War II. Dramatic falls in transport costs and free trade, enforced, if necessary, by colonial rule, combined...

This paper argues that increasing average incomes and stagnating levels of happiness, as observed in the United States since the 1970s, do not constitute a paradox. First, we show that the effect of higher incomes has been more than counteracted by changes in other socioeconomic variables,...

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...

This paper offers an integrated analysis of the forces shaping the emergence of the African slave trade over the early modern period. We focus our attention on two questions. First, why most of the increase in the demand for slaves during this period came exclusively from western Europeans....