Recent work emphasizes the primacy of differences in countries' colonially-bequeathed property rights and legal systems for explaining differences in their subsequent economic development. Barbados and Jamaica provide a striking counter example to this long-run view of income determination. Both...

Examination of special cases assists understanding of the mechanics of long-run economic growth more generally. Australia and California are two economies having the rare distinction of achieving 150 years of sustained high and rising living standards for rapidly expanding populations. They are...

Perhaps it does. We propose a model in which workers with little education or in the tails of the age distribution the inexperienced and the old have more chance of job failure (mismatch). Recruits' average education should then increase and the standard deviation of starting age decrease when...