In this article, we study the emergence of an extractive institution that hampered economic development in Italy for more than a century: the Sicilian ma a. Since its rst appearance in the late 1800s, the reasons behind the rise of the Sicilian ma a have remained a puzzle. In this article, we argue that the ma a arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind's discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy. More speci cally, we claim that ma a appeared in locations where producers made high pro ts from citrus production for overseas export. Operating in an environment with a weak rule of law, the ma a protected citrus production from predation and acted as intermediaries between producers and exporters. Using original data from a parliamentary inquiry in 1881-1886 on Sicilian towns, the Damiani Inquiry, we show that ma a presence is strongly related to the production of oranges and lemons. The results hold when different data sources and several controls are employed.

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We investigate the impact of slavery on the current performances of the US economy. Over a cross section of counties, we find that the legacy of slavery does not affect current income per capita, but does affect current income inequality. In other words, those counties that displayed a higher proportion of slaves are currently not poorer, but more unequal. Moreover, we find that the impact of slavery on current income inequality is determined by racial inequality. We test three alternative channels of transmission between slavery and inequality: a land inequality theory, a racial discrimination theory and a human capital theory. We find support for the third theory, i. e., even after controlling for potential endogeneity, current inequality is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal educational attainment of blacks and whites. To improve our understanding of the dynamics of racial inequality along the educational dimension, we complete our investigation by analyzing a panel dataset covering the 1940-2000 period at the state level. Consistently with our previous findings, we find that the educational racial gap significantly depends on the initial gap, which was indeed larger in the former slave states. IntroductionRecent developments in growth theory have debated the long-run influence of geography and institutions on comparative current economic performances. In this paper we address the same issue within the context of a single country -the United States -where a specific institution -slavery -has historically been associated more heavily with particular areas -primarily the South. To concentrate on a single country facilitates the empirical investigation on several grounds, since it reduces the risk of omitted variable bias that typically plagues across countries investigations. At the same time, because of their size and history, the US still presents sufficient variations along both the geographic and the institutional dimensions to make such investigation worthwhile.In the broader context of the Americas, Sokoloff (1997, 2005a) have influentially argued that factor endowments, in the form of soils, climate, and the size of the native population, have determined the diffusion of agricultural crops best suited for the employment of slave labor.The resulting unequal structure of society has in turn contributed to the evolution of a set of legal, political, and educational institutions meant to preserve the privileges of the elites. Thus, even though factor endowments themselves can be viewed as exogenous, these initial conditions have exerted a magnified effect on current performances because the institutions subsequently developed tended to reinforce their influence. These institutions have then exerted a persistent impact on economic outcomes long after the abolition of slavery, determining paths of development characterized by marked inequality in wealth, human capital, and political power. We test this theory for a cross section of US counties, with special emphasis on the legacy of...

Discussion on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on African Americans has been at center stage since the outbreak of the epidemic in the United States. To present day, however, lack of race-disaggregated individual data has prevented a rigorous assessment of the extent of this phenomenon and the reasons why blacks may be particularly vulnerable to the disease. Using individual and georeferenced death data collected daily by the Cook County Medical Examiner, we provide first evidence that race does affect COVID-19 outcomes. The data confirm that in Cook County blacks are overrepresented in terms of COVID-19 related deaths since - as of June 16, 2020 - they constitute 35 percent of the dead, so that they are dying at a rate 1.3 times higher than their population share. Furthermore, by combining the spatial distribution of mortality with the 1930s redlining maps for the Chicago area, we obtain a block group level panel dataset of weekly deaths over the period January 1, 2020-June 16, 2020, over which we establish that, after the outbreak of the epidemic, historically lower-graded neighborhoods display a sharper increase in mortality, driven by blacks, while no pre-treatment differences are detected. Thus, we uncover a persistence influence of the racial segregation induced by the discriminatory lending practices of the 1930s, by way of a diminished resilience of the black population to the shock represented by the COVID-19 outbreak. A heterogeneity analysis reveals that the main channels of transmission are socioeconomic status and household composition, whose influence is magnified in combination with a higher black share.

It is very common to analyse the factors associated with the onset and continuation of civil wars entirely separately, as if there were likely to be no similarity between them. This is an overstatement of the theoretical position, which has established only that they may be different (i.e. less than perfectly correlated). The hypothesis that the explanatory variables are the same is not theoretically excludable and is empirically testable, both for individual variables and for combinations of them. Starting from this approach yields a rather different picture of the factors associated with the continuation of civil wars, because the relatively small sample size means that confidence intervals on individual coefficients are wide in this case. It is shown here that country size, mountainous terrain and (in most datasets) ethnic diversity seem significant for the continuation of civil wars, starting from the null hypothesis that variables affect onset and continuation probabilities identically, rather than entirely independently. One variable that affects onset and continuation significantly differently is anocracy, which we find to matter only for onset. Civil war is more likely if it occurred two years previously, as well as one year previously, which indicates that wars are more likely to restart after only one year of peace, and also more likely to stop in their first year. The combined model strengthens the result that ethnic diversity matters (it is consistently significant across datasets, whereas it is not when onset is analysed separately), although in the UCD/PRIO dataset it is significant only for onset. By contrast, if continuation is analysed independently, virtually nothing is significant except a pre-1991 dummy and a dummy for civil war two years previously.