We exploit employment data from 10,528 parishes across nineteenth century England and Wales and find that a one standard deviation increase in finance employment increases the annualized growth rate of secondary labour by 0.8 percentage points. An endogenous growth model with finance and...

We analyze the impact of EU structural and cohesion funds on economic growth of European regions, using 2SLS to tackle the potential problem of endogeneity, and estimating a spatial model to account for inter-regional spillovers. We use the presence of environmentally protected areas (under the...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region's lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there has...

We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader's ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime...

We study an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation with threshold effects using regional data for West Germany. Our basic goal is to shed light on what makes German regions grow. The paper finds that the relative income distribution appears to be stratifying into a trimodal...

If people understand that some macroeconomic policies are unsustainable, why would they vote for them in the first place? We develop a political economy theory of the endogenous emergence of fiscal crises, based on the idea that the adjustment mechanism to a crisis favors some social groups,...

We examine how structural reforms relate to income inequality. We employ many indicators of structural reforms and use data for market and net income inequality. The dataset includes up to 135 countries since 1960. The results do not suggest that market-oriented structural reforms were...

A theoretical model describes the local choice of the tax rate on capital income. It establishes preferences and various fiscal conditions - including the tax rates of competing jurisdictions - as determinants of the tax rate. The empirical implications are tested using a large panel of...

This paper assesses sources of productivity spillovers in China's electric and electronic manufacturing industry using a rich panel data-set of 25,360 firms observed over the period 2004-2007. This industry is characterized by its important reliance on technology. In particular, the paper...

This paper assesses the role of intra-sectoral spillovers in total factor productivity across Chinese producers in the chemical industry. We use a rich panel data-set of 12,552 firms observed over the period 2004 - 2006 and model output by the firm as a function of skilled and unskilled labor,...