This paper examines whether coercive colonial institutions generated durable aversion to postcolonial institutions that resembled their features. Specifically, we study whether exposure to French colonial military conscription and its forced labor component depressed long-run engagement with French-language formal schooling. Facing chronic labor shortages, French colonial administrators in Mali (1927–1950) routinely activated military reservists—young men deemed fit but not drawn for regular service—as forced laborers for public works. Using newly digitized microdata on over 180,000 individual conscription files matched to four full-count postcolonial censuses, we estimate a difference-in-differences design that exploits quasi-random assignment of conscripts to regular soldier versus reservist status, combined with cross-district variation in the historical intensity of forced labor activation. Educational losses are substantial: in villages with high reservist shares, increasing the historical forced labor activation rate from the lowest to highest observed level reduces the share of villagers who ever received any primary schooling by one-and-a-half standard deviations in 1976. The human-capital penalty emerged for cohorts born after the 1940s, peaked for those born in the 1970s–1980s, and gradually faded among cohorts born after the mid-1990s. Although we detect short-lived declines in school supply in early postcolonial decades, the dominant mechanism operates through demand: exposed areas exhibit persistently lower parental demand for formal schooling and reduced support for French-led military interventions, consistent with rejection of postcolonial institutions evocative of colonial rule. Post-1990s education reforms—particularly bilingual schools combining local languages with French—partially eroded this legacy. Our findings reveal a dual imprint of colonial coercion: long-lived human-capital deficits rooted in historical mistrust, and their gradual attenuation through institutional adaptation that distances postcolonial institutions from their colonial predecessors.

China has experienced a remarkable rise in living standards over four decades of economic reforms, alongside a tremendous increase in inequalities. In this context, do Chinese people support redistribution of wealth gained through reform windfalls? To answer this question, we conducted an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample from China (N = 2,000). The treatment group was shown examples of wealth acquired through typical reform-era pathways requiring minimal ability or effort. This exposure led to a 0.1 standard deviation decrease in their support for redistribution. We propose a “reform windfall as redistribution” mechanism to explain this reduction: the treated group perceives the reform era as inherently redistributive, providing opportunities to escape systemic inequalities tied to the political system, thereby reducing the perceived need for formal redistribution. This decline in support is not driven by changes in fairness perceptions, as respondents do not attribute the wealth acquisition scenarios to ability or effort, nor do they view them as distinctly fair or unfair. Furthermore, we find limited evidence of heterogeneity, with one exception: individuals reporting higher economic pressure show an even greater reduction in redistributive support when exposed to the treatment. We hypothesize that this occurs because unmet expectations for upward mobility exacerbate their reactions to the treatment scenarios.

This paper constructs a new global historical database on public expenditure and revenue and their components—particularly education and health expenditure—covering all world regions over the 1800-2025 period. We document a large rise of human capital expenditure (as % of GDP) in all parts of the world in the long run, but with enormous and persistent inequality between regions. Public education expenditure per school-age individual in Sub-Saharan Africa is about 3% of the level observed in Europe and North America in 2025 in PPP terms (versus 6% in 1980 and 4% in 1950). We also find a large impact of human capital expenditure on productivity growth over the 1800-2025 period, especially for public education and for poor countries. Estimated returns using our macro-historical database are around 10% or more, in line with micro studies. Finally, we present simulations based on alternative human capital expenditure trajectories over the 2025-2100 period. In particular, we analyze the conditions under which convergence in human capital expenditure could lead to global productivity convergence by 2100 (around 100€ per hour in all regions in our benchmark scenario). 

This paper constructs the first harmonized long-run series of Chinese national wealth from 1911 to 2020 by combining newly assembled archival data with historical national accounts. The resulting evidence reveals a distinctive J-shaped trajectory of wealth-to-income ratios that stands in sharp contrast to the U-shaped pattern documented forWestern economies. China’s net national wealth-to-income ratio remained broadly stagnant around 300–400 percent for most of the twentieth century—reflecting the combined legacies of political fragmentation, wars, state intervention, and price distortions—and fell to a wartime nadir of around 200 percent amid the destruction of World War II, before rising steeply and persistently from the mid-1980s to nearly 900 percent in 2020. This delayed yet dramatic surge suggests that large-scale wealth accumulation in developing economies tends to emerge only when political centralization coincides with institutional and market transformations, including property rights reforms and the liberalization of asset prices. The long-run evolution of Chinese national wealth also reveals profound compositional shifts driven by ideological change. The public share of national wealth followed an inverted-U pattern—rising from negative shares during the Republican era to nearly 90 percent under Maoist socialism, before falling back to about 30 percent in the 2010s under a mixed-ownership regime—reflecting the century-long redefinition of the boundary between state and private property. Within the private sector, the asset composition shifted from farmland to residential housing and financial savings, while public wealth became increasingly concentrated in corporate assets. Finally, we observe a near-zero correlation between national saving and wealth growth, indicating that long-term changes in Chinese national wealth were primarily driven by capital gains and losses shaped by the interaction of market forces, state policies, and ideological transformations across successive political regimes.

This paper uses extended series on income and wealth inequality from the World Inequality Database (WID) covering all world regions over the 1800-2025 period, together with new series on hourly productivity and human capital expenditure, to revisit the relationship between equality and development, with a much broader comparative and historical perspective than previous studies. Over the long-run, we find a strong positive association between equality and productivity. Our proposed interpretation is that the rise of inclusive “social-democratic” institutions (including extended access to human capital, public services and democratic participation) led both to more equality and higher productivity, particularly in Western and Nordic Europe. We discuss the implications for future sustainable development strategies.

This paper provides new long-run evidence on the evolution of wealth in Japan by combining macroeconomic wealth-to-income ratios with distributional estimates of top wealth shares from 1905 to 2025. Extending earlier work on Japan’s national wealth back to the early twentieth century, our wealth-to-income series uncovers a distinctive “twin peaks” pattern: ratios surged to 700–800% in the 1920s and again during the financial bubble of the early 1990s. Unlike the gradual U-shaped trajectories observed in other Western economies, Japan’s experience features two abrupt episodes of extraordinary wealth accumulation relative to income, separated by a deep mid-century trough. To capture the distributional dimension, we construct a century-long series of top wealth shares from estate tax tabulations, building on prior research on estate-based wealth estimation and extending the record with newly digitized data through 2023. The distributional series tracks the macro dynamics closely: wealth inequality peaked in the 1930s, when the top 1% held over 30% of total wealth, and collapsed after the SecondWorldWar—driven by wartime destruction, land reform, and the 1946–47 wealth tax—bringing the top 1% share to roughly 10%. From the 1970s onward, top shares rose steadily, reaching nearly 50% at the height of the bubble before declining to about 20% in recent years. Taken together, these findings highlight the central role of crises, institutional reforms, and asset-price cycles in shaping Japan’s distinctive long-run wealth dynamics.

This paper constructs the first long-run estimates of top wealth concentration in South Korea from 1970 to 2021, using newly assembled estate tax tabulations and applying a simplified mortality multiplier method. The series uncovers a pattern that diverges sharply from the gradual postwar increase in wealth inequality seen in many Western economies. Korea experienced two distinct regimes: a two-decade period of low and stable concentration from 1970 to 1990, followed by a sustained doubling of the top 0.1 percent wealth share beginning in the late 1990s. This abrupt “Great Unleveling”, plausibly linked to institutional and market changes surrounding the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, coincided with a shift in elite portfolios from land-based to financial assets. In international perspective, Korea moves from a low-inequality profile typical of developing economies to a moderately high-inequality regime similar to contemporary France and Japan. The findings highlight how sudden institutional breaks—rather than gradual trends alone—shape the long-run distribution of wealth.

This paper investigates how the German public perceives Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) amid escalating geopolitical tensions and deepening China–EU economic interdependence, complemented by evidence on Chinese perceptions of German FDI. We combine data from a large-scale survey experiment embedded in the 2023 German Socio-Economic Panel Innovation Sample (N = 2,365) with a descriptive survey in China (N = 2,000). German respondents substantially overestimate the scale of Chinese investment—believing it accounts for about 30% of total inward FDI, compared to an actual share of roughly 1%—and evaluate it significantly less favorably than investment from other EU countries or the United States. In contrast, Chinese respondents express consistently positive views of German FDI, revealing a pronounced asymmetry in mutual perceptions. To probe the origins and malleability of these views, we implement three randomized interventions in Germany: a factual correction of actual FDI shares and two narrative framings emphasizing either positive or negative aspects of Chinese investment. While factual information modestly improves perceptions of FDI’s economic benefits, none of the treatments meaningfully shift deeper, ideologically anchored attitudes toward Chinese investment. Quantile treatment effect analyses indicate, however, that these interventions reduce anti-China biases among respondents who are initially more receptive to Chinese FDI. Taken together, the results—consistent across direct evaluations, conjoint choice experiments, and Willingness-to-Accept (WTA) measures—underscore the limits of informational interventions in reshaping entrenched geopolitical or identity-based biases toward foreign investment.

We combine household survey micro data, tax data, and national accounts to construct annual pretax income inequality series which is coherent with macro aggregates. We provide the distribution of pretax national income over the time period from 1933 to 2022, with detailed breakdown by income composition in the years from 1996 to 2022. Our new series demonstrates that Korean top income shares decreased substantially from the 1930s up until the mid-1960s, following various wars, independence and land reform policies. Income inequalities then stabilized against the backdrop of rapid economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s, and decreased even further from the late 1980s onwards until the onset of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, which contradicts the “Kuznets Curve". In the aftermath of the crisis, income inequality worsened due to the rise of tax-exempted capital income concentration at the top. Compared to other East Asian countries, South Korea exhibits relatively lower levels of income inequality in terms of higher bottom 50% income shares, mostly due to a more equal distribution of national income growth at the early stages of economic take-off in the 1980s, even though income concentration at the very top has strikingly worsened over the last two decades, with its top 1% income shares in 2022 returning back to the peak only observed during the colonial era.

We examine the enforcement of two pillars of colonial rule in French West Africa, military conscription and head tax collection, using novel district-level data from 1919 to 1949. Colonial states are often characterized as either omnipotent Leviathans or administration on the cheap. Our findings reveal their notable coerciveness in achieving key objectives. Military recruitment targets were consistently met, even amid individual avoidance and poor health conditions, by drawing on a pool of eligible fit young men. Tax compliance was similarly high, with approximately 80% of the liable population meeting obligations. Spikes in head tax rates significantly increased tax-related protests, likely prompting caution among colonial administrators. The tax burden was adjusted according to perceived district affluence, and tax moderation was applied in times of crisis. However, local shocks such as droughts or cash crop price collapses were largely ignored. These results underscore the capacity of colonial states to enforce their authority despite limited policy responsiveness, offering new insights into the political economy of colonial governance.

Recent experimental evidence suggests that meritocratic ideals are mainly a Western phenomenon. Intriguingly, the Chinese public does not appear to differentiate between merit- and luck-based inequalities, despite China’s historical emphasis on meritocratic institutions. We propose that this phenomenon could be due to the Chinese public’s greater reluctance to make an active choice in real-stake redistribution decisions. We run an incentivized redistribution experiment with elite university students in China and France where we vary the initial split of payoffs between two real-life workers to redistribute from. We show that Chinese respondents consistently and significantly choose more non-redistribution across different status quo scenarios. Additionally, if we exclude the individuals who engage in non-redistribution choices, Chinese respondents do differentiate between merit- and luck-based inequalities, and do not redistribute less than the French. Chinese respondents are as reactive as the French towards scenarios with noisy signals of merit, such as inequalities of opportunities. We argue that the reluctance to make an active choice signals diminished political agency to act upon redistribution decisions with real-life stakes, rather than apathy, inattention, having benefited from the status quo in Chinese society, or libertarian preferences among the Chinese. Notably, our findings show that the reluctance to make a choice is particularly pronounced among respondents of working-class or farming backgrounds, while it is absent among individuals whose families have closer ties to the private sector.