The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of
proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in …

From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes
a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the …

In recent years, economists have revived the specter of slow growth and secular stagnation.
From the point of view of economic history, what should we make of such doomster …

A large literature on persistence finds that many modern outcomes strongly reflect
characteristics of the same places in the distant past. However, alongside unusually high t …

This research explores the origins of observed differences in time preference across
countries and regions. Exploiting a natural experiment associated with the expansion of …

Across the social sciences, a key question is how societies manage to enforce cooperative
behavior in social dilemmas such as public goods provision or bilateral trade. According to …

Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development but is often in conflict
with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using …

We investigate the role of deeply rooted pre‐colonial ethnic institutions in shaping
comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the …

Knowledge of the origin and spread of farming has been revolutionised in recent years by
the application of new scientific techniques, especially the analysis of ancient DNA from …

This research advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the
prehistoric exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance to various …