This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...

Korea imports all of its primary energy, which leads to high dependency and vulnerability related to its energy supply. Efficiency in the use of energy is a way to reduce dependency and emissions. This study provides empirical results of the stochastic production process in energy use. Special...

We model the aid allocation decision where the donor government has announced that good governance is the criterion for receiving aid. Potential recipients must compete for the aid funds. The structure of the competition is important to the donor in terms of achieving good governance, and to the...

Since little is known about the degree of bias in estimated fixed effects in panel data models, we run Monte Carlo simulations on a range of different estimators. We find that Anderson-Hsiao IV, Kiviet’s bias-corrected LSDV and GMM estimators all perform well in both short and long panels....

In the tradition of Afriat (1967), Diewert (1973) and Varian (1982), we provide a revealed preference characterisation of the representative consumer. Our results are simple and complement those of Gorman (1953, 1961), Samuelson (1956) and others. They can also be applied to data very readily...

This paper presents a microfounded theory of long-term development. We model the interplay between economic variables, namely the process of human capital formation and technological progress, and the biological constraint of finite lifetime expectancy. All these processes affect each other and...

In order to simplify the representation of a technological relationship between inputs and outputs, a production unit’s technology must typically satisfy some restrictive conditions, some of them being well known in the literature. This paper presents new results for aggregating labour inputs...

This paper considers the implications of the permanent/transitory decomposition of shocks for identification of structural models in the general case where the model might contain more than one permanent structural shock. It provides a simple and intuitive generalization of the influential work...

This paper provides a unified theory of the economic and demographic transition. Individuals make optimal decisions about fertility, education of their children and the type and intensity of the investments in their own education. These decisions are affected by different dimensions of mortality...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...