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Endogenous Institutional Change After Independence
(2005)
A key event in economic history was the independence of nearly ninety former colonies after World War II. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative evidence, we argue that independence often constituted an institutional ...
Resource Conflict in Vulnerable Environments: Three Models Applied to Darfur
(2008-10-23)
A recurring argument in the global debate is that climate deteriora-
tion is likely to make social conflicts over dwindling natural resources
more common in the future. In this paper, we present a modelling
framework ...
Conflict Diamonds
(2003)
’Conflict diamonds’ refers to the fatal role that diamonds are believed
to have played in several African conflicts. The article analyzes the impact
of diamond abundance on economic growth in light of the broader,
previously ...
Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons
(2012-05)
Since its first appearance in the late 1800s, the origins of the Sicilian mafia have remained a largely unresolved mystery. Both institutional and historical explanations
have been proposed in the literature through the ...
Pharaoh´s Cage: Environmental Circumscription and Appropriability in Early State Development
(2019-11)
What explains the origins and survival of the first states around five thousand years ago? In this research, we focus on the role of productivity shocks for early state development in a single region: ancient Egypt. We ...
Quantifying Ethnic Cleansing: An Application to Darfur
(2010-12)
This paper has two objectives: First, to develop and critically examine
various measures of ethnic cleansing on the basis of a review of the existing
literature. Second, to apply the suggested measures to a unique sample ...
The Rise of Neolithic Agriculture
(2001)
The article analyzes the economic reasons behind the rise of Neolithic agriculture some 10,000 years ago in consideration of evidence that agri-culture was not associated with increasing standards of living. On the
basis ...
Reference-Dependent Utility in an Industrial Cluster
(2003)
This article tries to explain the exceptional levels of knowledge creation in certain industrial clusters, levels that are seemingly higher than what is implied by the usual models of atomistic agents who do not internalize ...
Unbundling Ex-Colonies: A Comment on Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson 2001
(2004)
In this comment on AJR (2001), we argue that a bundling of all former colonies into one ‘colonial’ theory of comparative development is problematic for several reasons. During the mercantilist wave of mainly Latin American ...
Roman Roads to Prosperity: Persistence and Non-Persistence of Public Goods Provision
(2018-02)
How persistent is public goods provision in a comparative perspective? We explore the link between infrastructure investments made during antiquity and the presence of infrastructure today, as well as the link between early ...