TY  - JOUR
AU  - Comin,Diego
AU  - Easterly,William
AU  - Gong,Erick
TI  - Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12657
PY  - 2006
Y2  - October 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12657
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12657.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Diego A. Comin
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: (617) 495-5011
E-Mail: dcomin@hbs.edu

William Easterly
New York University
Department of Economics
19 W. 4th Street, 6th floor
New York NY 10012
Tel: 212 992 8684
Fax: 212 995 4186
E-Mail: william.easterly@nyu.edu

erick gong
University of California, Berkeley
E-Mail: eg303@nyu.edu
AB  - We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 0 A.D., and 1500 A.D. for the predecessors to today's nation states. We find that this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly significant for today's national development outcomes. Although our strongest results are for 1500 A.D., we find that even technology as old as 1000 BC matters in some plausible specifications.
ER  -