The optimal reaction to a pending climate catastrophe is to accumulate capital to be better prepared for the disaster and levy a carbon tax to reduce the risk of the hazard by curbing global warming. The optimal carbon tax consists of the present value of marginal damages, the non-marginal...

The global response to a catastrophic shock to productivity which becomes more imminent with global warming is to have carbon taxes to curb the risk of a calamity and to accumulate precautionary capital to facilitate smoothing of consumption.  Our multi-region model of growth and climate change...

Many previous studies of the role of trade during the British Industrial Revolution have found little or no role for trade in explaining British living standards or growth rates.  We construct a three-region model of the world in which Britain trades with North America and the rest of the...

We present evidence that an increase in investment as a share of GDP predicts a higher growth rate of output per worker, not only temporarily, but also in the steady state. These results are found using pooled annual data for a large panel of countries, using pooled data for non-overlapping...

This paper examines the evidence for regional convergence or catch-up in levels and growth rates of per capita income among the 16 major states in India between 1960 and 1992. The results - estimated using OLS, the within-group LSDV estimator, Re-Weighted Least Squares, and Least Trimmed Squares...

Recent research has documented a U-shaped industrial concentration curve over an economy`s development path. How far can neoclassical trade theory take us in explaining this pattern? Building on Schott (2003), we estimate the production side of the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) model with industry data...

The rapid rise in schooling in developing countries in recent decades has been dramatic. However, many cross-country regression analyses of the impact of schooling on economic growth find low and insignificant coefficients. This empirical `puzzle` contrasts with theoretical arguments that...

The paper estimates cross-province growth regressions for China over the period of economic reform.  It first addresses the problem of model uncertainty by adopting two approaches to model selection, Bayesian Model Averaging and the automated General-to-Specific approach, to consider a wide...

What are the sources of productivity growth? Economic theory offers a panoply of explanations, considering the effects on productivity of organisational factors, research and development activity and factor accumulation, amongst other influences. Translating these theoretical models into...

During the past decade or so empirical literature on comparative development of nations has turned to investigation of "deep" or determinants of productivity and capital intensity, such as institutions, trade, geography and human capital.  In this paper I revisit this debate and make three...