How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development?

Spolaore, Enrico; Wacziarg, Romain

doi:10.3386/w18130

Cited by 57 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 105 publications

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“…A growing literature convincingly argues that historical events continue to shape current levels of economic development (Spolaore and Wacziarg, 2013;Nunn, 2014). Currently, however, we do not know how to translate these interesting findings into policy advice that is relevant for developing countries.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Instrumental Variables in the Long Run

Casey

Klemp

2017

SSRN Journal

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In the field of long-run economic growth, it is common to use historical or geographical variables as instruments for contemporary endogenous regressors. We study the interpretation of these conventional instrumental variable (IV) regressions in a simple, but general, framework. We are interested in estimating the long-run causal e↵ect of changes in historical conditions. For this purpose, we develop an augmented IV estimator that accounts for the degree of persistence in the endogenous regressor. We apply our results to estimate the long-run e↵ect of institutions on economic performance. Using panel data, we find that institutional characteristics are imperfectly persistent, implying that conventional IV regressions overestimate the long-run causal e↵ect of institutions. When applying our augmented estimator, we find that increasing constraints on executive power from the lowest to the highest level on the standard index increases national income per capita three centuries later by 1.2 standard deviations.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Instrumental Variables in the Long Run

Casey

Klemp

2017

SSRN Journal

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“…This question is part of the broader debate on the persistent political and economic effects of historical and cultural traits, and the extent that culture itself can be changed by policies and institutions (for recent discussions, Bisin and Verdier 2010;Spolaore and Wacziarg 2013). 4 In the long run, people can learn new languages, modify their cultural traits and identities, and transmit different traits to their children in response to changing incentives, including public policies.…”

Section: The Political Economy Of Heterogeneous Populationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is European Integration Really About? A Political Guide for Economists

Spolaore¹

2013

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Europe's monetary union is part of a broader process of integration that started in the aftermath of World War II. In this "political guide for economists" we look at the creation of the euro within the bigger picture of European integration. How and why were European institutions established? What are the goals and determinants of European Integration? What is European integration really about? We address these questions from a political-economy perspective, building on ideas and results from the economic literature on the formation of states and political unions. Specifically, we look at the motivations, assumptions, and limitations of the European strategy, initiated by Jean Monnet and his collaborators, of partially integrating policy functions in a few areas, with the expectation that more integration will follow in other areas, in a sort of chain reaction towards an "ever-closer union." The euro with its current problems is a child of that strategy and its limits.

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“…Spolaore and Wacziarg (2009a) provide 3 measures of genetic distance for each country pair: (i) F ST -dominant, which is the distance between the major ethnic groups of each country in a pair; (ii) F STweighted, which is the ethnic-level weighted genetic distance between two randomly selected individuals (one from each country); and (iii) F ST -1500, which proxies the genetic distance between countries as of 1500. The analysis employs F ST -weighted as the main genetic distance measure, since it better represents the average genetic distance between countries and is the measure used in the main analysis of Spolaore and Wacziarg (2009a,b, 2012, 2013a. 3 Based on these genetic distances, the analysis constructs relative genetic distances for each country pair in a similar fashion as other relative distances.…”

Section: Genetic Distancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture, Diffusion, and Economic Development

Harutyunyan¹,

Özak

2016

SSRN Journal

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This research explores the effects of culture on technological diffusion and economic development. It shows that culture's direct effects on development and barrier effects to technological diffusion are, in general, observationally equivalent. In particular, using a large set of cultural measures, it establishes empirically that pairwise differences in contemporary development are associated with pairwise cultural differences relative to the technological frontier, only in cases where observational equivalence holds. Additionally, it establishes that differences in cultural traits that are correlated with genetic and linguistic distances are statistically and economically significantly correlated with differences in economic development. These results highlight the difficulty of disentangling the direct and barrier effects of culture, while lending credence to the idea that common ancestry generates persistence and plays a central role in economic development.

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How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development?

Cited by 57 publications

References 105 publications

Instrumental Variables in the Long Run

Instrumental Variables in the Long Run

What is European Integration Really About? A Political Guide for Economists

Culture, Diffusion, and Economic Development

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