Suppression of the slave trade after 1807 increased the incidence of conflict between Africans.  We use geo-coded data on African conflicts to uncover a discontiuous increase in conflict after 1807 in areas affected by the slave trade.  In West Africa, the slave trade declined.  This...

We show that the long-run consequences of historical warfare are different for Sub-Saharan Africa than for the rest of the Old World.  We identify the locations of over 1,750 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799.  We find that historical warfare predicts greater state...

We study the origins of adult mental health using early life income fluctuations.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we show that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the...

We consider an observer who makes a finite number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good, where each observation consists of the market price and firm specific production quantities.  We develop a revealed preference test (in the form of a linear program) for the hypothesis...

This paper provides a means of accurately simulating explosive autoregressive processes, and uses this method to analyse the distribution of the likelihood ratio test statistic for an explosive second order autoregressive process. Nielsen (2001) has shown that for the asymptotic distribution of...

The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it.  Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I present a...

We undertake a generalization of the cumulative sum of squares (CUSQ) test to the case of non-stationary autoregressive distributed lag models with quite general deterministic time trends.  The test may be validly implemented with either ordinary least squares residuals or standardized...

In this paper, we consider the identification problem arising in the age-period-cohort models, as well as in the extended chain ladder model.  We propose a canonical parametrization based on the accelerations of the trends in the three factors.  This parametrization is exactly identified.  It...