This paper argues that legislative malapportionment, denoting a discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population held by electoral districts, serves as a tool for predemocratic elites to preserve their political power and economic interests after a transition to...

Levels of economic development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era. Colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country, depending on local conditions. Some activities, such as...

Public schools in Chile receive a per-student subsidy depending on enrollment, and are managed by local governments that operate under soft budget constraints. In this paper, we study the effects of this system on per-student expenditures. Per-student expenditures on rural areas are 30% higher...

Why does schooling attainment vary widely across countries? Why are differences in schooling attainment highly persistent? I show that cross-country differences in schooling are related to political institutions, such as democracy and local democracy (political decentralization), which are...

Using cross-country data for about 70 countries and regional data for about 180 African provinces, we show that competition between Protestant and Catholic missionaries increased schooling in former colonies. Our evidence implies that Protestant missionaries increased schooling in Catholic...

Using regional data for about 180 African provinces, we find that measures of Protestant missionary activity in the past are more correlated with schooling variables today than similar measures for Catholic missionary activity, as previous papers have suggested. However, we find that this effect...

The evolution of the skill premium (i.e., the wage differential between skilled and unskilled workers) has interest from at least two perspectives: it is a rough measure of inequality among workers of different qualifications and provides information on the characteristics of the development...

Sudden stops and international financial crises have been a main feature of developing countries in the last three decades. While their aggregate effects are well known, the disaggregated channels through which they work are not well explored yet. In this paper, we study the sectoral responses...