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...

Is it possible that relying too heavily on natural resources affects saving and investment in a way that hampers economic growth? – and thus, in the long run, the level of output per capita. This paper reviews the literature, explores the data and compares and contrasts the explanatory power...

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...

In most resource-driven developing economies, a mineral-based formal sector and an informal resource sector (such as charcoal production) constitute the main economic activities, from which local dwellers derive their livelihoods. The paper examines the coexistence of formal and informal...

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...