We introduce a new time series measure of the extent of federal regulation in the U.S. and use it to investigate the relationship between federal regulation and macroeconomic performance. We find that regulation has statistically and economically significant effects on aggregate output and the...

Recent growth theories have utilized the Ben-Porath (1967) mechanism according to which prolonging the period in which individuals may receive returns on their investment spurs investment in human capital and cause growth. An important, though sometime implicit implication of these models is...

The paper analyzes the consequences of joining markets of government discount bonds between identical economies when, in each country, there exists a positive probability of the government to default. In autarky such economies of overlapping generations of consumers with capital accumulation...

This paper demonstrates that the role of the personal income distribution for an economy's process of development through risky human capital accumulation critically depends on the shape of the saving function. Empirical evidence for the U.S. strongly suggests that the marginal propensity to...

Within the causal structure of economic development, we can distinguish between short-term and long-term causal links. In particular, this study examines long-term short-term causal relations in economic development. We construct a balanced panel for 72 countries over the period from 1980 to...

Are open economies characterized by superior economic performance in the long-run? This paper revisits this important question from the point of the view of unified growth theory. Contrary to other recent attempts to study this question, the paper considers two distinct channels through which...

We use the establishment of Special Economic Zones in China to estimate the effect of economic reforms on GDP. A panel of 270 Chinese cities from 1988 to 2010 allows us to exploit the variation in the establishment of zones across time and space. The results from our baseline...

In this paper we present a novel methodology for estimating the determinants of distribution dynamics and discuss an application to the distribution dynamics of (labour) productivity across a large sample of countries. We perform a Monte Carlo study of methodology taking as base Mankiw et al....

This paper builds a model of growth through industrialization, where machines replace workers in a growing number of tasks. This enables the economy to experience long-run growth, as machines become servants of humans, and as their number grows unboundedly. The mechanism that drives growth is...

Benhabib and Spiegel (1994) argue that regressing cross-country income changes on a catch-up term has the ability to distinguish between the Nelson-Phelps and Neo-classical approach. This paper circumstantiates that these findings constitute a statistical artefact according to Galton's Fallacy.