Latin America had the highest tariffs in the world before 1914; Asia had the lowest. Heavily protected Latin America also boasted some of the most explosive <italic>belle époque</italic> growth, while open Asia registered some of the least. What brought the two regions to the opposite ends of the tariff policy...

This paper uses a new database to establish a set of tariff facts that have not been well appreciated: tariff rates in Latin America were far higher than anywhere else in the century before the Great Depression; while lower than Latin America, tariffs were far higher in the European periphery...

This article uses a new database to establish a key finding: high tariffs were associated with fast growth before World War II, while they have been associated with slow growth thereafter. The paper offers explanations for the sign switch by controlling for novel measures of the changing world...

Why do rich countries receive the lion's share of international investment flows? Although this "wealth bias" is strong today, it was even stronger during the first global capital market boom before 1913. Very little of British capital exports went to poor countries, whether colonies or not....

Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly-changing parental education levels determine children's school enrollment to a greater degree than education...

Past research on aid and growth is flawed because it typically examines the impact of aggregate aid on growth over a short period, usually four years, while significant portions of aid are unlikely to affect growth in such a brief time. We divide aid into three categories: (1) emergency and...

We estimate the “place premiumâ€â€”the wage gain that accrues to foreign workers who arrive to work in the United States. First, we estimate the predicted, purchasing-power adjusted wages of people inside and outside the United States who are otherwise observably...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. We study a policy discontinuity in the...

The welcome rise of replication tests in economics has not been accompanied by a single, clear definition of replication. A discrepant replication, in current usage of the term, can signal anything from an unremarkable disagreement over methods to scientific incompetence or misconduct. This...

Research on migration and development has recently changed, in two ways. First, it has grown sharply in volume, emerging as a proper subfield. Second, while it once embraced principally rural–urban migration and international remittances, migration and development research has broadened to...