This paper asserts that the accumulation of capital causes cross-country differences in GDP per capita by generating disparities in the sectoral structure. For that purpose, we characterize the dynamic equilibrium of an endogenous growth that exhibits sectoral change due to the introduction of...

version: September 2011<br><br>This paper is intended to answer why and how innovation activities promoting economic growth may indeed induce economic fluctuations. To this purpose, it adds an adoption lag to an otherwise standard endogenous growth model with expanding product variety. It shows that the...

The nineteenth century was a time of substantial changes in the patterns of economic growth. This was also a period of significant fluctuations in the structure of and allocation of political rights. Through successive franchise extensions, democracy expanded dramatically, giving birth to the...

Today, per capita income differences around the globe are large – varying by as much as a factor of 35 across countries (Hall and Jones 1999). These differentials mostly reflect the "Great Divergence" (Sam Huntingon) – the fact that Western Europe and former European colonies grew rapidly...

The permanent decline of equipment prices relative to nondurable consumption prices rendered fixed-base quantity indexes obsolete, because of the well-known substitution bias. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) responded by switching to a flexible-base quantity index to measure GDP...

We analyze the transitional dynamics of a model with heterogeneous consumption goods. In this model, convergence is driven by two different forces: the typical diminishing returns to capital and the sectoral change inducing the variation in relative prices. We show that this second force a¤ects...

Europeans restricted their fertility long before other parts of the world did so. By raising the marriage age of women, and ensuring that a substantial proportion remained celibate, the "European Marriage Pattern" (EMP) reduced childbirths by up to 40%. We analyze the rise of this first...

Human capital accumulation may negatively affect economic growth by increasing tax avoidance and reducing effective tax rates and productive public investment. This paper analyzes how the endogenous feedback between human capital accumulation and tax avoidance affects economic growth and...