I examine the contribution of institutional breakdowns to long-run development, drawing on Argentina’s unique departure from a rich country on the eve of World War I to an underdeveloped one today. The empirical strategy is based on building a counterfactual scenario to examine the path of...

The present work uses long-term economic development data (1952-2010) as well as a detailed industry-level panel data (1963-2011) to analyse industrialisation patterns in Europe, implications of economic backwardness and the role of European integration in facilitating industrialisation and...

Women do not receive the same property rights protections as men in many countries. Given the importance of sound property rights for economic growth, this inequality should have significant implications for growth. This paper provides a first test of the importance of women’s property rights...

In this thesis, we will explore what led to the economic development and growth or lack of, in four African Countries with an imperial history. The countries chosen, have two different modern trajectories, the first of the countries; The Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya have a history of...

We propose a new set of indices to capture the multidimensionality of a country's institutional quality. Our indices are obtained by employing a dimension reduction approach on the institutional variables provided by the Frazer Institute (2018). We estimate the impact that our measures of...

This paper exploits the variation in the timing of electoral law enforcement across nine Latin American countries to consistently examine the contribution of de jure and de facto political institutions to long-run development. The set of novel measures of electoral law enforcement is constructed...

We investigate for human capital threshold effects on economic growth dealing with the issue of endogeneity of the threshold variable. We consider two measures of human capital: (i) the education level and (ii) an extended measure of it accounting for the health level. We provide clear-cut...