Melissa Dell "The Persistent Effects of Peru's Minning Mita"

...Using data from the Spanish Empire and Peruvian Republic to
trace channels of institutional persistence, I show that the mita's inuence has persisted through its impacts on land tenure and public goods provision. Mita districts historically had fewer large landowners and lower educational attainment. Today, they are less integrated into road networks, and their residents are substantially more likely to be subsistence farmers.

The paper is awesome and it is forthcoming in Econometrica.
The CV of Melissa Dell is impressive: she is a graduate summa cum laude at Harvard, has a doctorate from Oxford, Ph.D. candidate at MIT, ultra marathon runner (100 km), founder of a NGO in Peru ... and she has a severe vision impairment.