We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the post-war shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than...

[...]This article explores the inflation puzzle andinvestigates whether compensation has acted as either atemporary restraint on inflation or as the underlying sourceof a new inflation regime.2 After reviewing the recent behavior of inflation, we specify and estimate a traditionalprice-inflation...

Much of the literature on economic change in the post-1945 world is permeated by two ideas: the temporal convergence of per capita incomes across economies and the spatial advance of free trade. For many economists and historians the two are linked: the reduction of trade barriers in the...

Economic convergence has emerged as one of the key debates in the theoretical andhistorical literature over the last decade. Galor identified three forms of long run percapita income convergence: absolute convergence, whereby convergence occursindependently of the initial conditions facing each...

The distribution dynamics of incomes across Indian states are examined us-ing the entire income distribution rather than using standard regression ap-proaches.The period 1965 to 1997 exhibits twin-peaked dynamics: there aretwo income convergence clubs at 50% and 125% of the national...

This paper documents the convergence of incomes across Indian states over theperiod 1965 to 1998. It departs from traditional analyses of convergence by trackingthe evolution of the entire income distribution, instead of standard regression and timeseries analyses. The findings reveal twin-peaks...

We present a joint study of the U.S. structural transformation (thedecline of agriculture as the dominating sector) and regional convergence(of southern to northern average wages).We find empiricallythat most of the regional convergence is attributable to the structuraltransformation: 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...

Ever since the time of Adam Smith, the attribution to foreign trade of the abilityto affect the wholesale transformation of the productive powers of an economy hasremained a very powerful concept in both economics and economic history. At theheart of this interpretation is the observation that...