Gender-based discrimination is a pervasive and costly phenomenon. To a greater or lesser extent, all economies present a gender wage gap, associated with lower female labour force participation rates and higher fertility. This paper presents a growth model where saving, fertility and labour...

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...

Economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries. Four main channels of transmission from abundant natural resources to stunted economic development are discussed: (a) the Dutch disease, (b) rent seeking, (c) overconfidence,...

Throughout the post-war period Greece has faced a unique, and unfavourable, situation consisting of: (i) a perimetric location away from major European markets; and (ii) distorted economic relations as its northern borders were designed to be real barriers to communication and trade with...

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East Germany in 1989 experience a persistent...

Theoretical predictions of the impact of TFP growth on unemployment are ambiguous, and depend on the extent to which new technology is embodied in new jobs. We evaluate a model with embodied and disembodied technology, capitalization, and creative destruction effects by estimating the impact of...

The concepts of s-convergence, absolute b-convergence and conditional b-convergence are discussed in this paper. The concepts are applied to a variety of data sets that include a large cross section of 110 countries, the sub-sample of OECD countries, the states within the United States, the...