We explore the question of how political institutions and particularly democracy affect economic growth. Although empirical evidence of a positive effect of democracy on economic performance in the aggregate is weak, we provide evidence that democracy influences productivity growth in different...

One commonly held view about the difference between continental European countries and other OECD economies, especially the United States, is that the heavy regulation of Europe reduces its growth. Using newly assembled data on regulation in several sectors of many OECD countries, we provide...

Declining hours of work per worker in conjunction with a growing work force may give rise to fluctuations between growth regimes. This is shown in an overlapping generations model with two-period lived individuals endowed with Boppart-Krusell preferences (Boppart and Krusell (2020)). On the...

We scrutinize Thomas Piketty's (2014) theory concerning the relationship between an economy's long-run growth rate, its capital-income ratio, and its factor income distribution put forth in his recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We find that a smaller long-run growth rate may be...

Prettner (2019) studies the implications of automation for economic growth and the labor share in a variant of the Solow-Swan model. The aggregate production function allows for two types of capital, traditional and automation capital. Traditional capital and labor are imperfect substitutes...