Although theoretical models make distinct predictions about the relationship between financial sector development and income inequality, little empirical research has been conducted to compare their relative explanatory power. The authors examine the relation between financial intermediary...

Fifteen years of efforts to promote fiscal decentralization in China have failed to promote economic growth in China's provinces. This finding is surprising in the light of arguments that fiscal decentralization usually promotes provincial or local economic growth.Zhang and Zou use data on China...

Empirical evidence shows that entrepreneurs hold a large fraction of wealth, have higher saving rates than workers, and face substantial uninsurable entrepreneurial and investment risks. This paper constructs a heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model with uninsurable entrepreneurial risk...

Recent research has shown that the "spirit of capitalism"--a preference for wealth itself, in addition to consumption--has important implications for growth and asset pricing. This paper explores how the spirit of capitalism affects saving and consumption behavior. We demonstrate that the spirit...

Socialist economic growth in China and Eastern Europe has long been characterized by investment hunger, drives toward expansion, and cyclical fluctuation of investment rates. For decades, relatively high growth rates - often accompanied by a shortage of consumption goods - have typically been...

We develop a directed-technological-change model to address the issue of the optimal patent system and investigate how the optimal patent system influences the direction of technological change and the inequality of wage, where patents are categorized as skill- and labor-complementary. The major...

We develop a directed-technological-change model to address the issue of the optimal patent system and investigate how the optimal patent system influences the direction of technological change and the inequality of wage, where patents are categorized as skill- and labor-complementary. The major...