Research Summary
Research Summary
Overview
Description
My research lies in the intersection of economic growth and political economy focusing on the role of historical legacies, biogeography and culture in shaping contemporary economic performance. As growth economists our understanding of comparative economic development is bound to remain incomplete unless the primitive forces that have operated on the evolution of income levels across time and space are recognized and appropriately accounted for. In the quest to examine how the past shapes the present we face a natural trade-off between micro-level analyses and cross-country studies. The former are hard to generalize and in the latter is hard to achieve identification. My work aims at bridging this gap by shifting the focus from countries to ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Concentrating on the interaction between cultural groups and economic development, I create unconventional empirical strategies exploiting historical, anthropological, and linguistic sources as well as novel measures of economic activity to conduct rigorous empirical analyses across as well as within groups. My research contributes to three important sub-fields in the area of growth and political economy: the origins and consequences of group formation, institutions and development, and economic growth in the long-run.