The paper analyzes the effects of land reform on social development - poverty and land distribution - at the local level. Land reform in Colombia, understood as the allocation of public land to peasant, has granted 23 million hectares which comprises around 20% of Colombian territory and about...

Over two centuries, Colombia transferred vast quantities of land, equivalent to the entire UK landmass, mainly to landless peasants. And yet Colombia retains one of the highest concentrations of land ownership in the world. Why? We show that land reform's effects are highly bimodal. Most of...

The Spanish encomienda, a colonial forced-labor institution that lasted three centuries, killed many indigenous people and caused others to flee into nomadism. And yet we show that Colombian municipalities with encomiendas in 1560 enjoy better outcomes today across multiple dimensions of...

The object of this paper is to determine the relationship between geographical variables and income per capita, income per capita growth, population density and population growth in Colombian municipalities. In order to carry out econometric estimations at the municipal level we constructed a...