Regulations that constrain firms' externalities in one dimension can distort incentives and worsen externalities in other dimensions. In Peru's industrial fishing sector, the world's largest, fishing boats catch anchovy that plants along the coast convert into fishmeal. Matching administrative,...

I formulate and estimate a model of externalities within countries and technological interdependence across countries. I find that external returns to scale to physical capital within countries are 8 percent; that a 10 percent increase of total factor productivity of a country's neighbors raises...

Some natural resources—oil and minerals in particular—exert a negative and nonlinear impact on growth via their deleterious impact on institutional quality. We show this result to be very robust. The Nigerian experience provides telling confirmation of this aspect of natural resources. Waste...

The Industrial Revolution was characterized by technological progress and an increasing capital intensity. Why did real wages stagnate or fall in the beginning? I answer this question by modeling the Industrial Revolution as the introduction of a relatively more capital intensive production...

Applying the competing--risks model to multi--cause mortality, this paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities that occur between disease--specific policy interventions. We argue that since an individual cannot die twice, competing risks imply that...

In this paper we compare several historical scenarios very different one to each other both in institutional and geographical terms. What they have in common is the situation of relative poverty of most of the population. On the one part we are dealing with historical industrializing Catalonia...

The dismal growth performance of Africa is the worst economic tragedy of the XXth century. We document the evolution of per capita GDP for the continent as a whole and for subset of countries south of the Sahara desert. We document the worsening of various income inequality indexes and we...