The median voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on consequences of income distribution. For example, it has been proposed that greater inequality is associated with lower growth, because of the greater redistribution that is sought by the median voter when income...

An attempt to quantify possible negative effects of external crises in emerging market economies is made in this paper. The direct and indirect effects of the external crises, here sudden stops in capital flows and currency crises, are estimated and compounded into composite overall effects. In...

According to economic theory, the capital inflows reversal – so-called sudden stop – has a significant negative effect on economic growth. This paper investigates the direct impact of current account reversals on growth in Central and Eastern European countries. Two steps to conduct the...

The purpose of this paper is to reassess the standard Solow growth model,using a dynamic panel data approach. A new methodology is chosen to deal with this problem. First, unit root tests for individual country time series were run. Second, panel data unit root and cointegration tests were...

The relationship between financial sector and economic growth in transition countries has been largely ignored in the earlier empirical literature. In this paper, we analyse the finance-growth nexus using a fixed-effects panel model and unbalanced panel data from 25 transition countries during...

Utilising panel data for 14 East European transition economies, we find support for the hypothesis that a greater degree of export variety relative to the U.S. helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from...

There is no consensus about which variables, apart from income per capita, serve to characterize or define economic development, or guide its teaching. This paper proposes a simple and operational definition that combines the level of income per capita and the distribution of income. An economic...

In this paper, we have obtained closed-form solutions in Cass-Koopmans growth models with heterogeneous agents. The relationship between the form of production function and the dynamics of income distribution is made explicit. We then use this relationship to determine what production structure...