DRI Working Paper No. 26
By Diego Comin, New York University; William Easterly, New York University; Erick Gong, UC Berkeley

Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?
We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 BC, 0 AD, and 1500 AD 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 AD, we find that even technology as old as 1000BC matters in some plausible specifications.