This paper shows that access to finance is a crucial factor in explaining the link between the historical African slave trade and current GDP. We show that (1) the slave trade is strongly linked to modern firm access to finance, (2) the slave trade is associated with reduced access to both...

Automotive manufacturers are known to use deadline-based convex incentives to motivate dealerships to sell new cars. This paper shows that dealerships respond to these incentive targets by pushing customers from used to new cars as the end of the month approaches, and that subprime loans written...