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Persistence of Fortune: Accounting for Population Movements, There Was No Post-Columbian Reversal
Areendam Chanda, C. Justin Cook, and Louis Putterman
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Jul 2014, Vol. 6, No. 3: Pages 1-28

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

Areendam Chanda1, C. Justin Cook2 and Louis Putterman3

1Department of Economics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (e-mail: )

2School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California-Merced; 5200 N. Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343 (e-mail: ). Cook was at the Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison at the time this paper was written.

3Department of Economics, Box B, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 (e-mail: )

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 J11, J24, N10, N30, O15, O43, R11)