The con‡ict in Darfur has been described both as an ethnic cleansing campaign, carried out by the Sudanese government and its allied militias, and as a local struggle over dwindling natural resources between African farmers and Arab herders. In this paper, we construct a theoretical framework...

In this comment on AJR (2001), we argue that a bundling of all former colonies into one ‘colonial’ theory of comparative development is problematic for several reasons. During the mercantilist wave of mainly Latin American colonization between 1500-1830, strong capitalist institutions were...

Long-run technological progress is cyclical because drastic innovations that introduce new technological opportunity are only profitable at times when repeated incremental innovation has nearly exhausted existing technological opportunity and driven entrepreneurial profit and income growth...

Is social capital always important for economic growth? A number of recent micro studies suggest that interpersonal trust and social capital will have its greatest impact on economic performance when court institutions are relatively weak. The conventional wisdom from macro studies, however, is...

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...

http://hdl.handle.net/2077/32052 While it is widely believed that regions which experienced a transition to Neolithic agriculture early also become institutionally and conomically more advanced, many indicators suggest that within the Western agricultural core (including Europe, North Africa,...

The transition from a hunter-gather 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 the thousands of years of humankind’s economic development. In this paper...

A recurring argument in the global debate is that climate deterioration is likely to make social conflicts over dwindling natural resources more common in the future. In this paper, we present a modelling framework featuring three potential mechanisms for how the allocation and dynamics of...

The level of ethnic diversity is believed to have significant consequences for economic and political development within countries. In this article, we provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the determinants of ethnic diversity in the world. We introduce a model of cultural and ge-...

The article analyzes the economic reasons behind the rise of Neolithic agriculture some 10,000 years ago in consideration of evidence that agriculture was not associated with increasing standards of living. On the basis of archeological and anthropological literature, the article presents a...