This paper studies the distributional and the growth effects of public investment in a simple growth model with incomplete market where both growth and inequality are endogenously determined. Taxation lowers growth through distorting private investment, whereas public investment stimulates long...

We study the connection between economic performance and the quality of government institutions for the sample of 103 Italian NUTS3 regions, including new measures of institutional quality calculated using data on the provision of four areas of public service: health, educational...

We advance the hypothesis that cultural values such as high work ethics and thrift, “the Protestant ethic” according to Max Weber, may have been diffused long before the Reformation, thereby importantly affecting the pre-industrial growth record. The source of pre-Reformation Protestant...

We use the largest common factor in 14 items reported in the World Values Surveys as a robust measure of religiosity. This measure is held to identify the importance of religion in all aspects of people's life. The level of religiosity differs by about 50 percentage points between rich and poor...

This paper tries to understand the structural transformation in a global world. While employment and output have shifted out of the industrial sector and into services in the G7 countries, the majority of world manufacturing employment is now located in the developing countries of Asia,...

This paper presents a tractable endogenous two-sector growth model with non-Gorman intra-temporal preferences and directed technical change. One of the two consumption goods is a necessity, whereas the other is a luxury. If the economy starts with a low initial knowledge stock, households are...

This paper contributes to trade diversification literature by comparing changes in relative (i.e. assessed in comparison with world patterns) heterogeneity of import and export structures in the process of economic development. In particular, by focusing on the diversification of imports, we add...

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...

I broadly summarize the theoretical and recent empirical literatures on human development. Using Gray and Purser’s 1970-2010 database of human development index (HDI) components (income, life expectancy, literacy, gross enrolment ratios) for 135 countries, together with indicators of the...

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...