some interesting talks and a couple of articles

I’m surprised I had not come across these videos before. They are from a conference at Williams College on Historical Persistence in Comparative Development. This was the lineup for the conference

How Deep are the Roots of Economic Development?; Fertility and Modernity 

Enrico Spolaore, professor of economics at Tufts University and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Forced Coexistence and Economic Development: Evidence from Native American Reservations

Christian Dippel, assistant professor of economics in the Global Economics and Management Group at the UCLA Anderson School of Management

4:30 p.m. Climate and the Slave Trade

James Fenske, associate professor in the Department of Economics and deputy director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford

8 p.m. Keynote Address: The Global Spatial Distribution of Population and Economic Activity: Effects of Nature, History, and Agglomeration

David Weil, James and Merryl Tisch Professor of Economics at Brown University and research associate of the NBER

Engineers, Entrepreneurs, and Development in the Americas

William Maloney, lead economist in the World Bank’s Development Economic Research Group, former professor of economics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The Effect of the TseTse Fly on African Development

Marcella Alsan, assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine, core faculty member at Stanford’s Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research

Malthusian Dynamics and the Rise of the Poor Megacity

Dietrich Vollrath, associate professor of economics at the University of Houston

 “Unfinished Business”: Historic Complementaries, Political Competition, and Ethnic Violence in Gujarat

Saumitra Jha, associate professor of political economy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business

The European Origins of Comparative Development

Ross Levine, Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley

Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party

Nico Voigtländer, assistant professor of economics in the Global Economics and Management group at UCLA Anderson School of Management

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

Stelios Michalopoulous, assistant professor of economics at Brown University, faculty research fellow at the NBER, external research associate of the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy at the University of Warwick

Intergenerational Mobility and Institutional Change in 20th Century China

Noam Yuchtman, assistant professor in the Business and Public Policy Group at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty research fellow at the NBER

The videos of the talks can be found here on youtube.

Here is Slave Consumption in the Old South: A Double Edged Sword by Kathleen Hilliard at the American Historian

Erik Hilt’s Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the “New History of Capitalism” in the June Journal of Economic History can be accessed for free until the end of June