This paper examines the extent to which changes in working-age shares associated with population aging might slow economic growth in upcoming years. We first analyze the economic effects of changing working-age shares in a standard empirical growth model using country panel data from 1950-2015....

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...

In this paper I investigate the historical record of countries that have lived under a 'dollarized' monetary system. As it turns out, this is a very small group of counties, most of which have operated under very special circumstances, and for which there are very limited data. The results...

We introduce an instrumental variables approach to estimate the importance of unmeasured quality growth for a set of 66 durable consumer goods. Our instrument is based on predicting which of these 66 goods will display rapid quality growth. Using pooled cross- relatively sections of households...

The demographic transition a change from high to low rates of mortality and fertility has been more dramatic in East Asia during this century than in any other region or historical period. By introducing demographic variables into an empirical model of economic growth, this essay shows that this...

For over a century social analysts have debated the connection between trade policy and economic performance. This controversy continues today, even as the world is experiencing an unprecedented period of trade liberalization, and in spite of numerous empirical studies that claim to have found a...

This study examines the claim that the AIDS epidemic will slow the pace of economic growth. We do this by examining the association, across fifty-one developing and industrial countries for which we were able to assemble data, between changes in the prevalence of AIDS and the rate of growth of...

This paper analyzes the determinants of savings in the world economy, and discusses why saving ratios have been so uneven across countries. A distinction is made between private and government savings, using panel data for 36 countries, from 1970 to 1992. In particular, it is assumed that...

In the wake of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, both the U.S. and Canada experienced a sustained increase in job reallocation, including firms moving into exporting. The change involved big firms as much as small firms. To mimic these patterns,we formulate a model of innovation by both...

We study economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. Our analysis is based on new data on forty-four countries spanning about two hundred years. The dataset incorporates over 3,700 annual observations covering a wide range of political systems,...