Recently, there has been a growing interest in social capital and in the difficulties related to its measurement. In this paper, we propose to measure social capital by means of principal components analysis. Then, we present the first available international social capital estimates for the...

Deindustrialisation: Although Belfast’s industrial base had experienced decline since the 1930s, the indus-trial crisis reached its peak in the late 1970s/early 1980s with all the traditional industrial sectors affected (e.g. shipbuilding, engineering, linen-production). Due to the accelerated...

This paper develops a simple model to analyze how a lack of politi-cal competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. Wetest the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. Inthese data, we …nd robust evidence that lack of political competitionin a state is...

Whether or not the marginal product of capital (MPK) differs across countriesis a question that keeps coming up in discussions of comparative economic developmentand patterns of capital flows. Using easily accessible macroeconomic datawe find that MPKs are remarkably similar across countries....

Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-passattempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of productionand efficiency. It answers the question “how much of the cross-country income variance canbe attributed to...

In this paper we apply the same framework totime-series data from the United States over theperiod 1963–1992. We find that throughout thisperiod the efficiencies of skilled labor and capitalhave risen. The efficiency of unskilled laborhas risen in tandem with those of the otherfactors in the...

There are two sources of inconsistency in existing cross-country empiricalwork on growth: correlated individual effects and endogenous explanatoryvariables. We estimate a variety of cross- country growth regressions usinga generalized method of moments estimator that eliminates both problems.In...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justification forcapital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought tobe taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to benonlinear functions of income and consumption and find that, when ability...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justi…cation for capital income taxation: goodspreferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxesare allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption and …nd that, when ability...

[...]This paper examines the impact that the PCAstandards had on bank portfolios following the passage ofFDICIA in 1991. To do this, the simultaneous equationsmodel developed by Shrieves and Dahl (1992), and latermodified by Jacques and Nigro (1997) to study the impactof risk-based capital, is...