Recent economic growth theory has suggested that wealth differences across nations must be due, at least in part, to the failure in many places to adopt existing production techniques. There are many potential reasons for the failure to adopt existing technology, including the political clout of...

In this paper, I study the welfare properties of growth models with endogenous innovation, knowledge externalities, and monopoly pricing of new goods. Since useful policy prescriptions cannot be inferred from a balanced growth analysis, welfare is analyzed for transition paths. I provide a...

If firm sizes have a small dispersion, microeconomic shocks lead to negligible aggregate fluctuations. This has led economists to appeal to macroeconomic (sectoral or aggregate shocks) shocks to explain aggregate fluctuations. However, the empirical distribution of firms is fat-tailed. This...

We use data on wages and rents in different U.S. cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born...

Empirical evidences tell us that in the recent years the expansion period is increased with reduction of the contraction period in the U.S. business cycles. Moreover, the business cycles in the United States also show the trend to be moderated with recent economic growth induced and supported by...

Based on a theoretical consideration of human capital production technology, this study empirically investigates the growth implication of dispersion of population distribution in terms of educational attainment levels. Based on a pooled 5-year interval time-series data set of 94 developed and...

Existing evidence for unconditional convergence in the OECD is mixed, and depends largely on whether time series or cross sectional methods are used. In this paper we reconsider the evidence for unconditional convergence by dividing the long run data into several subperiods. We use a two stage...

This paper presents an accumulation-driven growth model where investment depends on public policy which in turn depends on economically important fundamentals. It is argued that conditioning on factor accumulation in growth regressions that also include policy variables may be problematic. When...

The recent literature on “convergence� of cross-country per capita incomes has been dominated by two competing hypotheses: “global convergence� and “club-convergence�. This debate has recently relied on the study of limiting...