Institutions, and more specifically private property rights, have come to be seen as a major determinant of long-run economic develop- ment. We evaluate the case for property rights as an explanatory factor of the Industrial Revolution and derive some lessons for the analysis of developing...

This paper argues that corruption in developing countries has deep historical roots; going all the way back to the characteristics of their colonial experience. The degree of European settlement during colonial times is used to differentiate between types of colonial experience, and is found to...

This paper offers an integrated analysis of the forces shaping the emergence of the African slave trade over the early modern period. We focus our attention on two questions. First, why most of the increase in the demand for slaves during this period came exclusively from western Europeans....

In this paper we search for empirical support for the thesis that institutions are a major driver of economic development. While most of the literature uses cross-country regressions (and thus limits itself to the between-country variation in the data), this paper uses pooled OLS, panel...

This paper advances that the share of European descendants in the population is a major determinant of democracy in former colo- nial countries. We test this hypothesis using cross-section and panel regressions with 60 developing and developed countries that were once colonies. We …nd that the...

Two mechanisms have attracted considerable attention from researchers studying the effects of income on happiness: adaptation and social comparison. In most empirical studies these two mechanisms have been considered separately. This paper contributes to the literature by jointly testing for the...

The aim of this paper is to o¤er a more appropriate test of Kuznets inverted-Uhypothesis than the one routinely used in the literature and implement it using panel and country-by-country regressions. We explore whether countries experiencing large shifts in population from the agri-...

We investigate the effects of having children at home on individual happiness. Contrary to much of the literature, we find effects that are positive, large and increasing in the number of children. These effects, however, are contingent on the individual's characteristics. Children make married...

We propose a theoretical analysis of democratization processes in which an elite extends the franchise to the poor when threatened with a revo- lution. The poor could govern without changing the political system by maintaining a continuous revolutionary threat on the elite. Revolutionary...

The effect of mortality reductions on fertility is one of the main mech- anisms stressed by the recent growth literature in order to explain demo- graphic transitions. We analyze the empirical relevance of this mechanism based on the experience of all countries since 1960. We distinguish be-...