Recommender systems are being used by an ever-increasing number of E-commerce sites to help consumers find products to purchase. What started as a novelty has turned into a serious business tool. Recommender systems use product knowledge -- either hand-coded knowledge provided by experts or "

will play in knowledge management and in electronic commerce. In addition, I show how arising web standards such as RDF and XML can be used as

This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the qual-ity of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common-law countries generally have the strongest, and French-civil-law countries the weakest, legal

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This document is a revision of the public working draft dated 1998-08-19 incorporating suggestions received in review comments and further deliberations of the W3C RDF Model and Syntax Working Group. With the publication of this draft, the RDF Model and Syntax Specification enters "last call

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for unskilled labor is less well developed. This paper applies an understanding of what computers do – the execution of procedural or rules-based logic – to develop and test a simple model of how the widespread adoption of computers in the workplace might alter workplace skill demands. Two essential contentions

We exploit differences in early colonial experience to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Our argument is that Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. The choice of colonization strategy was, at least in part, determined by the feasibility of whether Europeans could settle in the colony. In places where Europeans faced high mortality rates, they could not settle and they were more likely to set up worse (extractive) institutions. These early institutions persisted to the present. We document these hypotheses in the data. Exploiting differences in mortality rates faced by soldiers, bishops and sailors in the colonies during the 18th and 19th centuries as an instrument for current institutions, we estimate large effects of institutions on income per capita. Our estimates imply that a change from the worst (Zaire) to the best (US or New Zealand) institutions in our sample would be associated with a five fold increase in income per capita.

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Among countries colonized by European powers during the past 500 years those that were relatively rich in 1500 are now relatively poor. We document this reversal using data on urbanization patterns, which, we argue, proxy for economic prosperity. This reversal is inconsistent with a view that links economic development to geographic factors. According to the geography view, societies that were relatively rich in 1500 should also be relatively rich today. In contrast, the reversal is consistent with the role of institutions in economic development. The expansion of European overseas empire starting in the 15th century led to a major change in the institutions of the societies they colonized. In fact, the European intervention appears to have created an “institutional reversal ” among these societies, in the sense that Europeans were more likely to impose “extractive ” institutions in densely settled and prosperous areas, while introducing institutions encouraging investment in regions that were previously poor. This institutional reversal accounts for the reversal in relative incomes. We provide further support for this view by documenting that the reversal in relative incomes took place during the 19th century, and resulted from societies with extractive institutions failing to take advantage of industrialization opportunities.