This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'World Bank Economic Review', 2007, 21, 1-20.<p> There has been a revival of interest in the effect of risk on economic growth. We quantify both ex ante and ex post effects of risk using a stochastic version of the Ramsey model. We develop a...</p>

We postulate a two-region world, comprised of North (calibrated after the US) and South (calibrated after China). Our optimization results show the compatibility of the following three desiderata: (1) Global CO2 emissions follow a conservative path that leads to the stabilization of...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the impact of inequality on economic growth. Both theoretical and empirical approaches have produced ambiguous results on sign and size of this relationship. Although there is a considerable part of the literature that considers inequality...

This paper provides an analytic review of selected contributions to the study of institutions and economic growth. We review the contributions to the study of institutional determinants of long-run growth by Engerman and Sokoloff, and Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson. We discuss the work of Rodrik...

This article proposes a new measure of civil war. The measure defines violence intensity in casualties per capita instead of number of casualties. We discuss the assumptions behind this per capita model and the existing standard model. We show that the two measures behave differently in standard...

We are interested in the relation between Gini coefficients of education, educational variables, and growth. We specify a system of 14 difference equations with lagged dependent variables in education variables, as well as a growth regression, auxiliary equations for savings and investment...

This paper seeks to identify relationships between human capital and cultural capital, in the context of local labour market productivity. The key constituents of human capital, identified in the literature, are jointly examined in a close-to-reality-model. The main advantage of our model of...