We study how barriers to competition - such as, restrictions to business start-up and strict enforcement of covenants or IPR - affect the investment in knowledge capital when contracts are not enforceable. These barriers lower the competition for human capital and reduce the incentive to...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the growth effects of education and social capital. The main focus is on the cross-country evidence for the OECD countries, but the paper also briefly reviews evidence from labour economics, to clarify where empirical work on education using macro...

The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power...

We examine the growth performance of Sweden in the post-World War II period, focusing on explaining the relative decline of economic growth in Sweden since the early 1970's. The hypothesis that the relative decline is a consequence of productivity catch-up is rejected. A number of potential...

The paper contains a thorough review of explanations for the weak British growth performance of the 1950s through the 1970s and an assessment of the long-term implications of the 1980s attempt to escape from relative decline. The analysis draws on recent work in growth theory and places...

We examine the contribution of human capital to economy-wide technological improvements through the two channels of innovation and imitation. We develop a theoretical model showing that skilled labour has a higher growth-enhancing effect closer to the technological frontier under the reasonable...

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...

We model technological and financial innovation as reflecting the decisions of profit maximizing agents and explore the implications for economic growth. We start with a Schumpeterian endogenous growth model where entrepreneurs earn monopoly profits by inventing better goods and financiers arise...

We develop a stylized model of economic growth with bubbles. In this model, financial frictions lead to equilibrium dispersion in the rates of return to investment. During bubbly episodes, relatively inefficient investors demand bubbles while relatively efficient investors supply them. Because...