The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
نویسندگان
چکیده
We exploit differences in the mortality rates faced by European colonialists to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. In places where Europeans faced high mortality rates, they could not settle and they were more likely to set up extractive institutions. These early institutions persisted to the present. Exploiting differences in mortality rates faced by soldiers, bishops and sailors in the colonies in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as an instrument for current institutions, we estimate large effects of institutions on income per capita. Once we control for the effect of institutions, we find that countries in Africa or those closer to the equator do not have lower incomes. Forthcoming American Economic Review ∗We thank Joshua Angrist, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Stan Engerman, John Gallup, Claudia Goldin, Robert Hall, Chad Jones, Larry Katz, Richard Locke, Valerie Ramey, Andrei Shleifer, Ken Sokoloff, Judith Tendler, three anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Berkeley, Brown, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, NBER, Northwestern, NYU, Princeton, Rochester, Stanford, Toulouse, UCLA and The World Bank for useful comments. We also thank Robert McCaa for guiding us to the data on bishops’ mortality. †Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, E52-380b, Cambridge, MA 02319, and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; e-mail: [email protected] ‡Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA 02319; e-mail: [email protected]. §University of California, Department of Political Science, 210 Barrows Hall, Berkeley CA94720; e-mail: [email protected].
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