Our Research: Full Index

  Back to Research Home

Research related to:  History

The European Origins of Economic Development

  |  

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe during colonization had an enduring effect on economic development, researchers have been unable to assess these predictions directly because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. We construct a new database on the European share of the population during colonization and examine its association with economic development today. We find a strong, positive relation between current income per capita and colonial European settlement that is robust to controlling for the current proportion of the population of European descent, as well as many other country characteristics. The results suggest that any adverse effects of extractive institutions associated with small European settlements were, even at low levels of colonial European settlement, more than offset by other things that Europeans brought, such as human capital and technology. 

William Easterly and Ross Levine

A Long History of a Short Block: Four Centuries of Development Surprises on a Single Stretch of a New York City Street

  |  

Economic development is usually analyzed at the national level, but the literature on creative destruction and misallocation suggests the importance of understanding what is happening at much smaller units. This paper does a development case study at an extreme micro level (one city block in New York City), but over a long period of time (four centuries). 

William Easterly, Laura Freschi, and Steven Pennings

The Influence of Ancestral Lifeways on Individual Economic Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa

  |  

We explore the role of an individual’s historical lineage in determining economic status, holding constant his or her current location. This is contemporary to the more common approach to studying how history shapes economic outcomes across locations. Motivated by a large literature in social sciences stressing the beneficial influence of agricultural transition on contemporary economic performance at the level of countries, we examine the relative status of descendants of agriculturalists vs. pastoralists.

Stelios Michalopoulos, Louis Putterman and David N. Weil

Commercial Imperialism? Political Influence During the Cold War

  |  

We provide evidence that increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War, was used to create a larger foreign market for American products. Following CIA interventions, imports from the US increased dramatically, while total exports to the US were unaffected. The surge in imports was concentrated in industries in which the US had a comparative disadvantage, not a comparative advantage. Our analysis is able to rule out decreased trade costs, changing political ideology, and an increase in US loans and grants as alternative explanations . . . 
Daniel Berger, William Easterly, Nathan Nunn, Shanker Satyanath

Discovering Law: Hayekian Competition in Medieval Iceland

  |  

It is commonplace to assume that legal institutions must be established and enforced by government. The general consensus, even among defenders of free markets, is that some minimal government need exist to provide law. However, between 930 and 1262 the Icelandic Commonwealth (or Free State) functioned in the absence of a coercive state, relying instead on market mechanisms and private institutions. An elaborate legal system developed that guided social interaction and coordinated conflict resolution, without a central government. This article utilizes Hayek’s theory of competition as a discovery process to examine the general social structure and private legal institutions within Medieval Iceland. The goal is to provide an economic theoretical lens to more adequately explain the particular private legal institutions that enabled Iceland to function successfully without a central government for over 300 years.
Carrie B. Kerekes and Claudia R. Williamson

Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa. Past and Present

  |  

It was indeed empire that European leaders at the end of World War II needed to reconstruct. They had come very close to losing a struggle with another form of empire, the Nazi Reich, and in South East Asia they had lost valued territories to a country that had dared to play the empire-game with them— Japan. At the same time, both British and French leaders felt, with some reason, that they had been saved by their empires: by the resources in men and material contributed by the dominions and colonies of Great Britain and by the symbolic importance of French Equatorial Africa’s refusal to follow Vichy, followed by the contributions of North African territories and diverse African people to the reconquest of European France from the Mediterranean . . . 
Frederick Cooper

The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa

  |  

We show that current differences in trust levels within Africa can be traced back to the trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. Combining contemporary individual-level survey data with historic data on slave shipments by ethnic group, we find that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today. Evidence from a variety of identification strategies suggest that the relationship is causal. Examining causal mechanisms, we show that most of the impact of the slave trade is through factors that are internal to the individual, such as cultural norms, beliefs, and values.
Leonard antchekon and Nathan Nunn

Women's Rights and Development

  |  

Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men's conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ultimately resolving them in favor of the latter. As husbands, men stood to gain from their privileged position in a patriarchal world whereas, as fathers, they were hurt by a system that afforded few rights to their daughters . . . 
Raquel Fernández

Was the Wealth of Nations determined in 1000 BC?

  |  

We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 Bc, 0 Ad, and 1500 AD for the predecessors to today’s nation states. Technological differences are surprisingly persistent over long periods of time. Our most interesting, strong, and robust results are for the association of 1500 AD technology with per capita income and technology adoption today . . . 

Missing Women: Age and Disease

  |  

Relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world, most notably sub- Saharan Africa, there are far less women than men in India and China. It has been argued that as many as a hundred million women could be missing. The possibility of gender bias at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations. We provide a decomposition of these missing women by age and cause of death. While we do not dispute the existence of severe gender bias at young ages, our computations yield some striking new findings . . . 

Women's Rights and Development

  |  

Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and declining fertility) exacerbated the tension in men's conflicting interests as husbands versus fathers, ultimately resolving them in favor of the latter. As husbands, men stood to gain from their privileged position in a patriarchal world whereas, as fathers, they were hurt by a system that afforded few rights to their daughters. The model predicts that declining fertility would hasten reform of women's property rights whereas legal systems that were initially more favorable to women would delay them. The theoretical relationship between capital and the relative attractiveness of reform is non-monotonic but growth inevitably leads to reform. I explore the empirical validity of the theoretical predictions by using cross-state variation in the US in the timing of married women obtaining property and earning rights between 1850 and 1920.
Raquel Fernandez, NYU

The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa

  |  

We investigate the historical origins of mistrust within Africa. Combining contemporary household survey data with historic data on slave shipments by ethnic group, we show that individuals whose ancestors were heavily threatened by the slave trade today exhibit less trust in neighbors, family co-ethnics, and their local government. We confirm that the relationship is causal by instrumenting the historic intensity of the slave trade by the historic distance from the coast of the respondent’s ancestors, controlling for the respondent’s current distance from the coast . . . 
Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon

Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?

  |  

We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 BC, 0 AD, and 1500 AD for the predecessors to today's nation states. We find that this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly significant for today's national development outcomes. Although our strongest results are for 1500 AD, we find that even technology as old as 1000BC matters in some plausible specifications.
Diego Comin, New York University; William Easterly, New York University; Erick Gong, UC Berkeley

Development, Democracy, and Mass Killings

  |  

Using a newly assembled dataset spanning from 1820 to 1998, we study the relationship between the occurrence and cruelty of episodes of mass killing and the levels of development and democracy across countries and over time. We find that massacres are more likely at intermediate levels of income and less likely at very high levels of democracy, but we do not find evidence of a linear relationship between democracy and probability of mass killings. In the XXth century, discrete improvements in democracy are systematically associated with less cruel massacre episodes. Episodes at the highest levels of democracy and income involve relatively fewer victims . . .