Most humans are significantly richer than their ancestors. Humanity gained nearly all of its
wealth in the last two centuries. How did this come to pass? How did the world become rich …

In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe
for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war …

The study of the state is both central to the social sciences and of great practical importance.
From Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the Northern Triangle (El …

Two important puzzles characterize the development of pre-modern Eurasian polities. First,
most rulers convened councils of nobles, but only European monarchs expanded them to …

What drives the propagation of discriminatory fake news? To answer this question, this
paper focuses on India at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: on March 30, a Muslim …

A growing literature posits that colonial Christian missions brought schooling to the colonies,
improving human capital in ways that persist to this day. But in some places, they did much …

We use district-level data from India to study the implications of two historical institutions,
direct British rule and the heterogeneous land tenure institutions implemented by the British …

This study examines the impact of historical disease burden on the development of
contemporary China. Using historical records spanning nearly six centuries, we construct a …

The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a
complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state …

We put forth a political scope condition for the classic argument that war motivates
expansions in state fiscal capacity. All major European monarchies separated the power to …