We exploit differences in early colonial experience to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Our argument is that Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. The choice of colonization strategy was, at least in part, determined by the feasibility of whether Europeans could settle in the colony. In places where Europeans faced high mortality rates, they could not settle and they were more likely to set up worse (extractive) institutions. These early institutions persisted to the present. We document these hypotheses in the data. Exploiting differences in mortality rates faced by soldiers, bishops and sailors in the colonies during the 18th and 19th centuries as an instrument for current institutions, we estimate large effects of institutions on income per capita. Our estimates imply that a change from the worst (Zaire) to the best (US or New Zealand) institutions in our sample would be associated with a five fold increase in income per capita.

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We use a framework suggested by a model of rational addiction to analyze empirically the demand for cigarettes. The data consist of per capita cigarettes sales (in packs) annually by state for the period 1955 through 1985. The empirical results provide support for the implications of a rational

This paper analyzes the determinants of initial public offerings (IPOs) in Italy. We compare the ex ante and the ex post characteristics of IPOs with those of a large sample of privately held companies. The likelihood of an IPO is positively related to the company's size and the industry's market-to-book ratio. Companies appear to go public not to finance future investments and growth, but rather to rebalance their accounts after a period of high investment and growth. IPOs are also followed by a reduction in the cost of credit and an increased turnover in control. These findings highlight some important differences between the role played by the equity market in Italy (and likely in other Continental European countries) and in the United States. This paper is part of the research project on "The decision to go public and the stock market as a source of capital," promoted by the Ente "Luigi Einaudi" per gli studi monetari bancari e finanziari. The suggestions we received from Espen E...

in which oligonucleotide arrays were employed to assess the genetic effects of ionizing radiation on seven thousand human genes. A simple nonparametric empirical Bayes model is introduced, which is used to guide the ef � cient reduction of the data to a single summary statistic per gene, and also to make

examines why and discusses how economists might make sustained contributions to the empirical analysis of social interactions.

An empirical analysis of electricity consumption in Cyprus*

nothing directly to do with coding or decoding will show that in some sense belief propagation "converges with high probability to a near-optimum value" of the desired belief on a class of loopy DAGs Progress in the analysis of loopy belief propagation has been made for the case of networks

Machine learning for text classification is the cornerstone of document categorization, news filtering, document routing, and personalization. In text domains, effective feature selection is essential to make the learning task efficient and more accurate. This paper presents an empirical comparison

of image gathers in factorized VTI media