The Rise of Europe: Reproduction of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005)

This repository provides a Python-based replication of the results from:

"The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth"
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson
American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 3, June 2005, pp. 546–579.

Repository Structure

📂 acemoglu-atlantic-traders-2005
│-- 📄 README.md         # Project description and instructions
│-- 📄 requirements.txt  # List of dependencies
│-- 📂 data/             # Folder containing datasets (included in the repo)
│-- 📂 src/              # Python scripts for data processing and analysis
│-- 📂 figures/          # Awesome 🤪 matplotlib graphs (figure 1a and 1b of the paper)

Data Sources

The dataset includes:

• Historical GDP and population data
• Measures of institutional quality (e.g., constraints on the executive from the Polity IV dataset)
• Data on Atlantic trade (imports, exports, slave trade involvement)

Installation

To set up the project, first clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/Basso42/acemoglu-atlantic-traders-2005.git
$ cd acemoglu-atlantic-traders-2005

This project requires the following Python libraries:

• pandas
• statsmodels
• matplotlib

Create a virtual environment and install dependencies:

$ python -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows use `venv\Scripts\activate`
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

References

• Acemoglu, D., Johnson, S., & Robinson, J. (2005). The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth. American Economic Review, 95(3), 546-579.
• Original replication materials: AER website