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Rethinking the Effects of Financial Liberalization

Broner, Fernando; Ventura, Jaume - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2010

During the last few decades, many emerging markets have lifted restrictions on cross-border financial transactions. The conventional view was that this would allow these countries to: (i) receive capital in flows from advanced countries that would finance higher investment and growth; (ii)...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010851384

The Wind of Change: Maritime Technology, Trade and Economic Development

Pascali, Luigi - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2014

The 1870-1913 period marked the birth of the first era of trade globalization. How did this tremendous increase in trade affect economic development? This work isolates a causality channel by exploiting the fact that the steamship produced an asymmetric change in trade distances among countries....

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010851482

Structural Development Accounting

Gancia, Gino; Müller, Andreas; Zilibotti, Fabrizio - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2010

In this paper, we construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources of cross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technology adoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The key components of our...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010710590

Democracy and the curse of natural resources

Cabrales, Antonio; Hauk, Esther - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2007

, in countries with weak institutions. Natural resources may be bad for democracy by harming political turnover. Our model … also suggests a non-linear dependence of human capital on natural resources. For low levels of democracy human capital … depends negatively on natural resources, while for high levels of democracy the dependence is reversed. This theoretical …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010547492

Social Capital, Government Expenditures, and Growth

Ponzetto, Giacomo; Troiano, Ugo - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2014

We present a tractable stochastic endogenous growth model that explains how social capital influences economic development. In our model, social capital increases citizens' awareness of government activity. Hence, it alleviates the electoral incentives to under- invest in education, whose...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010851377

Financial Reforms and Capital Flows: Insights from General Equilibrium

Martin, Alberto; Ventura, Jaume - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2012

As a result of debt enforcement problems, many high-productivity firms in emerging economies are unable to pledge enough future profits to their creditors and this constrains the financing they can raise. Many have argued that, by relaxing these credit constraints, reforms that strengthen...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010851426

The Implicit Theory of Historical Change in the work of Alan S. Milward

Lynch, Frances M. B.; Guirao, Fernando - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2011

Alan S. Milward was an economic historian who developed an implicit theory of historical change. His interpretation which was neither liberal nor Marxist posited that social, political, and economic change, for it to be sustainable, had to be a gradual process rather than one resulting from a...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010547408

Banks and Development: Jewish Communities in the Italian Renaissance and Current Economic Performance

Pascali, Luigi - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2012

Do banks affect long-term economic performance? I answer this question by relying on an historical development that occurred in Italian cities during the 15th century. A sudden change in the Catholic doctrine had driven the Jews toward money lending. Cities that were hosting Jewish communities...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010547447

Human Capital and Regional Development

Gennaioli, Nicola; Laporta, Rafael; López-de-Silanes, … - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2011

We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1569 sub-national regions from 110 countries covering 74 percent of the world’s surface and 96 percent of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010711780

Risk Sharing with the Monarch: Excusable Defaults and Contingent Debt in the Age of Philip II, 1556-1598

Drelichman, Mauricio; Voth, Hans-Joachim - Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Barcelona GSE) - 2012

Contingent sovereign debt can create important welfare gains. Nonetheless, there is almost no issuance today. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale use of state-contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010851380