Showing 1 - 10 of 279
Stabilizing and liberalizing policies are key elements of the Washington Consensus. This paper adds a historical dimension to the ongoing debate by assessing the economic impact of market-oriented reforms undertaken during General Franco’s dictatorship, the 1959 Stabilization and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008468511
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 inflows from advanced countries that would finance higher investment and growth; (ii) insure...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008784713
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 are different types of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008854520
This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005123872
Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this … democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 … to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with rising levels of democracy. We find that primary schooling, and …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009320398
Countries with strong executive constraints have lower growth volatility but similar average growth to those with weak constraints. This paper argues that this may explain a strong reduced-form correlation between executive constraints and inflows of foreign investment. It uses a novel dataset...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011145416
To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009246604
This paper explores the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over the both the short and very long run. Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting poor countries between 1865 and 2007. A single equation error correction model...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011084231
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011213308
We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011262883