Persistence of Fortune: Accounting for Population Movements, There Was No Post-Columbian Reversal

Areendam Chanda, Justin Cook () and Louis Putterman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2014, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-28

Abstract: Using data on place of origin of today's country populations and the indicators of level of development in 1500 used by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2002), we confirm a reversal of fortune for colonized countries as territories, but find persistence of fortune for people and their descendants. Persistence results are at least as strong for three alternative measures of early development, for which reversal for territories, however, fails to hold. Additional exercises lend support to Glaeser et al.'s (2004) view that human capital is a more fundamental channel of influence of precolonial conditions on modern development than is quality of institutions.

JEL-codes: J11 J24 N10 N30 O15 O43 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
Note: DOI: 10.1257/mac.6.3.1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/mac.6.3.1 (application/pdf)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/mac/app/0603/2013-0032_app.pdf (application/pdf)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/mac/data/0603/2013-0032_data.zip (application/zip)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/mac/ds/0603/2013-0032_ds.zip (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Persistence of fortune: Accounting for Population Movements, There was no Post-Columbian Reversal (2013)
Working Paper: Persistence of Fortune: Accounting for Population Movements, There was No Post-Columbian Reversal (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aejmac:v:6:y:2014:i:3:p:1-28

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics is currently edited by Simon Gilchrist

More articles in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().