Acemoglu (last year's prize) has some.

Circumstancial evidence includes:

1. Having natural resources is often bad for development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

2. Scotland is in the UK because it tried to do colonialism, bankrupted itself and had to sell itself to England.

2. Ireland and Finland are doing as well as any other European country but never colonized anyone and were themselves colonized.

Colonialism is basically just a distracting game countries played before economic growth was invented.