The author of this note takes it as self evident that prosperity and the provision of "things" (buildings, roads, furniture, furnishings, clothes, machines and equipment of all sorts) go together. The way people generally speak and act is in line with this view. If this is so, domestic...

Is industrial production relatively in decline? No, it is not. This note displays the evidence that for the last 40 years, in the 6 largest economies of the world, industrial production has kept pace with total output.

There is much talk of the knowledge economy, and the central role of ideas and knowledge in generating economic growth. This paper provides a brief review of the economic literature on how skills/ knowledge/ ideas might contribute to higher output or higher rates of growth. Ideas are...

This note is motivated by recent arguments made by Martin Feldstein in which the relevance of inequality is dismissed (if everybody's income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and the argument is made that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care...

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the sixteenth century has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of Iberian decline. I document and quantify the surge in ennoblement through a new time series of nobility cases preserved in the Archive of the Royal Chancery...

It has been suggested that …scal federalism is a good way to induce decentralized entities to behave parsimoniously, but this has been largely criticized in the literature, in particular because of the Common-Pool problem. In this paper, we present an extra facet of the latter problem. We...