The effect of business tax and regulation on growth, together with potential effects of government spending on education and R&D, is embodied in a model of a small open economy with growth choices. The structural model is estimated on post-war panel data for 76 countries and the bootstrap is...

In earlier work (Bénabou, Ticchi and Vindigni 2013) we uncovered a robust negative association between religiosity and patents per capita, holding across countries as well as US states, with and without controls. In this paper we turn to the individual level, examining the relationship between...

We study the relationship between geography and growth. To do so, we first develop a dynamic spatial growth theory with realistic geography. We characterize the model and its balanced growth path and propose a methodology to analyze equilibria with different levels of migration frictions. We...

This paper examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships, geography and the structure of the production network in firm performance. We develop a simple model where firms can outsource tasks and search for suppliers in different locations. Low search and outsourcing costs lead firms to...

This paper makes three contributions to the growing literature on culture and economics. Using answers to the World Values Survey for a sample of 79 countries over the 1989-2004 period, we first provide evidence of cultural homogenization between countries. Second, we provide a model of...

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

We show that financial sector bailouts and sovereign credit risk are intimately linked. A bailout benefits the economy by ameliorating the under-investment problem of the financial sector. However, increasing taxation of the non-financial sector to fund the bailout may be inefficient since it...

This paper examines the relationship between openness and within-country regional inequality across 28 countries over the period 1975-2005. In particular, it tests a) whether increases in trade lead to rising inequalities, b) whether these inequalities recede in time, and c) whether increases in...

We study patterns of FDI in a multi-country world economy. First, we present evidence for a broad sample of countries that firms direct FDI disproportionately to markets with income levels similar to their home market. Then we develop a model featuring non-homothetic preferences for quality and...