"We explore the role of government in the nexus of finance and trade starting from the earliest days of organised finance in England and then broadening the analysis to 84 countries from 1960 to 2004. For 18th century England, we find that the government expenditures and international trade did...

This paper derives the skill content of 30 countries, ranging from low-income to high-income ones, from the occupational structure of their economies. Five different skills are defined.. Cross-country measures of skill content show that the intensity of national production of manual skills...