This research suggests that favorable geographical conditions, that were inherently associated with inequality in the distribution of land ownership, adversely affected the implementation of human capital promoting institutions (e.g., public schooling and child labor regulations), and thus the...

The largest cities in the world today lie mainly in relatively poor countries, which is a departure from historical experience, when the largest cities were typically found in the richest places. Using new data on the demographic history of the 100 largest mega-cities of today, we establish...

This research suggests that favorable geographical conditions, that were inherently associated with inequality in the distribution of land ownership, adversely affected the implementation of human capital promoting institutions (e.g., public schooling and child labor regulations), and thus the...

This research suggests that favorable geographical conditions, that were inherently associated with inequality in the distribution of land ownership, adversely affected the implementation of human capital promoting institutions (e.g., public schooling and child labor regulations), and thus the...

This paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of land ownership adversely affected the emergence of human capital promoting institutions (e.g., public schooling) and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, contributing to the...

This research develops a unified growth theory that captures the transition from the domination of geographical factors\ in the determination of productivity in early stages of development to the domination of institutional factors in mature stages of development. It identifies a novel channel...

Recent empirical work has established that 'democracy causes growth'. In this paper, we determine the underlying institutions which drive this relationship using data from the Varieties of Democracy project. We sketch how incentives and opportunities as well as the distribution of political...

How substantial are the economic benefits from democratic regime change? We argue that democratisation is often not a discrete event but a two-stage process: autocracies enter into ‘episodes’ of political liberalisation which eventually culminate in regime change or not. To account for this...