Slavery has been a major institution of labor coercion throughout history. Colonial societies used slavery intensively across the Americas, and slavery remained prevalent in most countries after independence from the European powers. We investigate the impact of slavery on long-run development...

Transformative technologies like generative artificial intelligence promise to accelerate productivity growth across many sectors, but they also present new risks from potential misuse. We develop a multi-sector technology adoption model to study the optimal regulation of transformative...

We provide a potential explanation for the absence of, and unwillingness to create, centralized power in the hands of a national state in many societies based on the political agenda effect. State centralization induces citizens of different backgrounds, interests, regions or ethnicities to...