This research explores the economic causes and consequences of language structures. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that variations in pre-industrial geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher return to agricultural investment, larger gender gap in...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...

The paper reexamines Lipset’s theory of democratization, by distinguishing the role of (economic) development from that of education, inequality, and (natural) resources. We highlight two contrasting effects of education and human capital accumulation. On the one side, education prompts...

We study the implications of two historical institutions, direct British rule, and the heterogeneous land tenure institutions implemented by the British, on disparity in present day development using district level data from India. Using nightlights per capita as a proxy for district level per...

The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly...

Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

Understanding the factors that may produce a sustained rate of innovation is important for promoting economic development and growth. In this paper, we examine the role of human capital in firms’ innovation by using a large sample of manufacturing firms from China. We use two firm-level...

By merging individual data on valuable patents granted in Prussia in the late nineteenth century with county level information on literacy and income tax revenues we show that increases in the stock of human capital not only improved workers' productivity but also accelerated innovative...

The costs of low-carbon energy fell dramatically over the past decade, leading to rapid growth in its deployment. However, many challenges remain to deploy low-carbon energy at a scale necessary to meet net zero carbon emission targets. We argue that developing complementary technologies and...