Countries in which billionaire heirs' wealth is large relative to G.D.P. grow more slowly, show signs of more political rent-seeking, and spend less on innovation than do other countries at similar levels of development. In contrast, countries in which self-made entrepreneur billionaire wealth...

Around the world, large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Outside the U.S. and the U.K., pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding and super voting rights are common. Using these devices, a family can control corporations without making a...

Macroeconomists acknowledge the contribution of human capital to economic growth, but their empirical studies define human capital solely in terms of schooling. In this paper, we extend production function models of economic growth to account for two additional variables that microeconomists...

This paper questions current empirical practice in the study of growth. We argue that much of the modern empirical growth literature is based on assumptions concerning regressors, residuals, and parameters which are implausible both from the perspective of economic theory as well as from the...

Using revised, updated, and consistent annual post-World War II data from the G-7 countries developed by us, we econometrically estimate and test alternative explanations of the structure of economic growth in a model with three inputs tangible capital, labor, and human capital which permits the...

Using a new specification, we reanalyze the data on worldwide environmental quality investigated by Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger in a well-known paper on the environmental Kuznets curve (which postulates an inverse U shaped relationship between income level and pollution). The new...

This paper revisits the yield spread's usefulness for predicting future real GDP growth. We show that the contribution of the spread can be decomposed into the effect of expected future changes in short rates and the effect of the term premium. We find that both factors are relevant for...

This paper describes the correlations between inequality and the growth rates in cross-country data. Using non-parametric methods, we show that the growth rate is an inverted U-shaped function of net changes in inequality: Changes in inequality (in any direction) are associated with reduced...

This paper examines the robustness of explanatory variables in cross-country economic growth regressions. It employs a novel approach, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates (BACE), which constructs estimates as a weighted average of OLS estimates for every possible combination of included...

Malaria ranks among the foremost health issues facing tropical countries. In this paper, we explore the determinants of cross-country differences in malaria morbidity, and examine the linkage between malaria and economic growth. Using a classification rule analysis, we confirm the dominant role...