Colonial powers typically organized economic activity in the colonies to maximize their
economic returns. While the literature has emphasized long-run negative economic impacts …

International wars and interstate rivalry have been at the center of our understanding of the
origin and expansion of state capacity. This article describes an alternative path to the …

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the nineteenth
century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades …

Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? The authors address this
question by examining the consequences of the deadliest pandemic of the last millennium …

In economies with a large informal sector firms can increase profits by reducing workers'
outside options in that informal sector. We formalise this idea in a simple model of an …

To what extent can workers in developing countries seize gains from trade? To answer this
question we resort to a unique exogenous labor demand shock triggered by a surge in the …

This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor
emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase …

I use a unique dispute between major aid donors in the International Whaling Commission
(IWC) to investigate whether donor nations change their aid giving in response to changes …

We provide evidence of how restrictions on labor mobility, such as serfdom and other types
of labor coercion, impact labor market outcomes. To do so, we estimate the impact of a large …

This study develops a theoretical model of trade with heterogeneous firms and imperfect
contracting institutions to examine the impact of trade liberalization on the quality of …