Many scholars have argued that once basic needs have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple...

This paper investigates the link between health care expenditures and GDP for a sample of 21 OECD countries using recent developed panel cointegration techniques. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis accounts for the fact that health care expenditures are not only determined by income....

What is the relationship between economic growth and its volatility? Does political instability affect growth directly or indirectly, through volatility? This paper tries to answer such questions using a power-ARCH framework with annual time series data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. We show...

This paper argues that accounting for the dynamic interactions between endogenous changes in longevity, the education composition of the population, and the associated fertility differential is crucial for understanding the economic and the demographic transition. In the model, heterogeneous...

This paper examines changes in individual earnings during positive and negative growth periods in three Latin American economies: Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. We ask whether those individuals who start in the best economic position are those who experience the largest earnings gains or the...

This paper investigates the effects of financial development and political instability on economic growth in a power-ARCH framework with data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. Our findings suggest that (i) informal or unanticipated political instability (e.g., guerrilla warfare) has a direct...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

While China shared many systemic, initial conditions with the transition economies of Central-East Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), it had a more agricultural economy and a more stable political-economic system than many CEE and CIS countries. Unlike most of the CEE...

Does faster economic growth increase pressure for democratic change, or reduce it? Using data for 154 countries for the period 1963-2007, we examine the short-run relationship between economic growth and moves toward and away from greater democracy. To address the potential endogeneity of...

Current empirical growth models limit the determinants of country growth to geographic, economic, and institutional variables. This study draws on conflict variables from the Correlates of War (COW) project to ask a critical question: How do different types of conflict affect country growth...