Ancestry and development: New evidence

By Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg. Journal of applied econometrics, 2018

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We revisit the relation between ancestral distance and barriers to the diffusion of development using a new genomic dataset on human microsatellite variation. With these new data we find a statistically and economic significant effect of ancestral distance from the technological frontier on income per capita, controlling for geographic factors, climatic differences, continental fixed effects and genetic diversity within populations. The historical pattern of the effect is hump shaped, peaking between 1870 and 1913, and declining steeply afterwards. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that ancestral distance acts as a temporary barrier to the diffusion of innovations and development.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4925c7e0cf4d77f2195eda78c7ceb9fe73d1e08d