The measurement of national income has added greatly to our understanding of economic and social change in Europe over the past hundred years. But national income analysis does not take full account of changes in welfare and particularly of the causes and effects of long-term changes in the...

In this paper, we show that strategic complementarities--such as firm-specific factors or quasi-kinked demand--have crucial implications for the design of monetary policy and for the welfare costs of output and inflation variability. Recent research has mainly used log-linear approximations to...

This Paper takes a broader look at how vertical linkages can trigger the spatial agglomeration of economic activity in a ‘new economic geography’ (NEG) set-up. First, it formally establishes the key positive features of a wide class of vertical-linkage models without resorting to numerical...

We review a recent body of theoretical work that aims to put numbers on the consequences of globalization. A unifying theme of our survey is methodological. We rely on gravity models and demonstrate how they can be used for counterfactual analysis. We highlight how various economic...

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...

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...

Do countries with lower policy-induced barriers to international trade grow faster, once other relevant country characteristics are controlled for? There exists a large empirical literature providing an affirmative answer to this question. We argue that methodological problems with the empirical...

This paper examines the economic rationale for concern about the falling rate of growth of Europe's population. It also assembles demographic and economic time-series data for the countries of Eastern and Western Europe during the postwar period. The consequences of demographic developments for...