In a seminal contribution, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) argue property-rights institutions powerfully affect national income, using estimated mortality rates of early European settlers to instrument capital expropriation risk. However 36 of the 64 countries in their sample are assigned...

The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...

Recently, for the first time, international data on IQ scores across countries have become available. The new data opens up the exciting possibility of using cross country analysis to study IQ and its determinants. One important potential determinant of IQ is income inequality. The purpose of...

What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that...

We criticize existing empirical results on the detrimental effects of natural resource dependence on the rate of economic growth after controlling for institutional quality, openness, and initial income. These results do not survive once we use instrumental variables techniques to correct for...

Contemporary Western political culture is characterized by three achievements and ideas: (1) the limitation of government or the rule of law; (2) some institutional separation of the economy and of science from government and religion; and (3) popular participation or democracy. The first two...

We examine the role of services in the structure of production and trade. Working with a cross-country sample of 17 social accounting matrices, we develop stylized facts relating upstream and downstream service linkages to incomes and the input-output structure of production. Expansion of...

Basic conceptual, statistical and measurement aspects of the intangible assets are considered regarding to their contribution to the economic growth. The increasing importance of the intangible assets in the modern economy is described. The role of the intangible assets in the creating of the...

The economic history of Argentina presents one of the most dramatic examples of divergence in the modern era. What happened and why? This paper reviews the wide range of competing explanations in the literature and argues that, setting aside deeper social and political determinants, the various...

What obstacles prevent the most productive technologies from spreading to less developed economies from the world’'s technological frontier? In this paper, we seek to shed light on this question by quantifying the geographic and human barriers to the transmission of technologies. We argue that...