We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transition to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical strategy is...

I reconsider the primacy of institutions over geography as an explanatory factor of cross-country differences in economic performance, which has recently been postulated by Acemoglu et al. (2001) and others. My estimates show that the reported missing direct performance effects of a measure of...

This paper introduces wealth-dependent time preference into a simple model of endogenous growth. The model generates adjustment dynamics in line with the historical facts on savings and economic growth in Europe from the High Middle Ages to today. Along a virtuous cycle of development more...

We reconsider the effects of long-run economic growth on relative factor prices across cones of specialization. We model economic growth as exogenous technical change. Allowing for capital biased technical change with a sector bias and for endogenous commodity prices, we find that economic...

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition hypothesis claims that rising incomes cause a transition to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical...

The growth rate of total factor productivity seems to have increased recently, at least in the United States. Higher US productivity growth may justify higher stock market valuations than in the past and thus herald an emerging New Economy. However, the size of the estimated growth rate of total...

Conventional R&D-based growth theory argues that productivity growth is driven by population growth but the data suggest that the erstwhile positive correlation between population and productivity turned negative during the 20th century. In order to resolve this problem we integrate R&D-based...

This paper proposes a theory for the gradual evolution of knowledge diffusion and growth over the very long run. A feedback mechanism between capital accumulation and the ease of knowledge diffusion explains a long epoch of (quasi-) stasis and an epoch of high growth linked by a gradual economic...

We set up a simple overlapping generation model that allows us to distinguish between life expectancy and active life expectancy. We show that individuals optimally adjust to a longer active life by educating more and, if the labor supply elasticity is high enough, by supplying less labor. When...

Die entwicklungspolitische Debatte hat lange darunter gelitten, daß ihr eine überzeugende theoretische Grundlage fehlte. Dies beginnt sich seit einigen Jahren mit dem Aufkommen der "neuen" Wachstumstheorie zu ändern. Deren Implikationen stützen das, was neoklassisch orientierte...