The Legacies of Slavery in and out of Africa

The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences on contemporaneous socio-economic outcomes, drawing from my own previous work on the topic and from an extensive review of the available literature. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the \u201csending\u201d countries in Africa, with attention to their economic, institutional, demographic, and social implications. Next I evaluate the consequences of the slave trade on the \u201creceiving\u201d countries in the Americas. Here I distinguish between the case of Latin America and that of the United States. Overall, I show that the slave trades exert a lasting impact along several contemporaneous socioeconomic dimensions and across diverse areas of the worl

Growth, Colonization, and Institutional Development. In and Out of Africa

This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from standard growth regressions, I analyze the role of Africa’s peculiar history, which has been marked by its colonization experience. Next I discuss the potential growth impact of state fragility, a concept which reflects multiple facets of the dysfunctions that plague the continent. The last topic I address is the influence, in and out of Africa, of the slave trades. The essay ends with critical conclusions and suggestions for further research

Women, medieval commerce, and the education gender gap

We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country’s Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861- 1901 period. We find robust evidence that female primary school attainment, relative to that of males, is positively associated with the medieval pattern of commerce, along the routes that connected Italian cities among themselves and with the rest of the world. The effect of medieval commerce is particularly strong at the non-compulsory upperprimary level and persists even after controlling for alternative long-term determinants reflecting the geographic, economic, political, and cultural differentiation of medieval Italy. The long-term influence of medieval commerce quickly dissipates after national compulsory primary schooling is imposed at Unification, suggesting that the channel of transmission was the larger provision of education for girls in commercial centers

The Fragile Definition of State Fragility

We investigates the link between fragility and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa over a yearly panel including 28 countries for the 1999-2004 period. Beside the conventional definition of fragility adopted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, we introduce the more severe definition of extreme fragility. We show that only the latter exerts a significantly negative impact on economic development, once standard economic, demographic, and institutional regressors are accounted for. As a by-product of this investigation we produce up-to-date evidence on the growth performance of the area. We find a tendency to convergence and no influence of geographic and historical factors