The transition from a hunter-gatherer economy to agricultural production, which made possible the endogenous technological progress that ultimately led to the Industrial Revolution, is one of the most important events in thousands of years of humankind's economic development. In this paper we...

It is by now generally agreed that government corruption is a serious impediment to economic growth. An intensive use of informal tolls and bribes on roads and waterways still prevail in several developing countries, hampering trade and economic development. On the basis of a general model of a...

We analyze the impact of a natural experiment in Indonesia that allocated certain district governments with a windfall revenue from natural resource production. Our identification is based on a comparison between bordering districts in provinces that received the windfall with those that did not...

Cultural norms diverge substantially across societies, often within the same country. We propose and investigate a self-domestication/selective migration hypothesis, proposing that cultural differences along the individualism-collectivism dimension are driven by the out-migration of...

All since the rise of the first civilizations, economic development has been closely intertwined with the evolution of states. In this paper, we contribute to the literature on state history and long-run economic development in four ways. First, we extend and complete the state history index...

This paper investigates the long-run influence of the Neolithic Revolution on contemporary cultural norms and institutions as reflected in the dimension of collectivism-individualism. We outline an agricultural origins-model of cultural divergence where we claim that the advent of farming in a...

Since the transition to agricultural production, property rights to land have been a key institution for economic development. Clearly defined land rights provide economic agents with increased access to credit, secure returns on investment, free up resources used to defend one's land rights,...