This paper brings together two strands of the economic literature -- that on the finance-growth nexus and that on capital market integration -- and explores key issues surrounding each strand through both institutional/country histories and formal quantitative analysis. We begin with studies of...

Studies of early U.S. growth traditionally have emphasized real-sector explanations for an acceleration that by many accounts became detectable between 1815 and 1840. Interestingly, the establishment of the nation's basic financial structure predated by three decades the canals, railroads, and...

We estimate the rate of total factor productivity growth in Indian manufacturing industry for the period 1973-1992, and compare the results to those obtained by Young for the East Asian Tigers. We then interpret our results in light of Krugman's hypothesis that, because the Asian Miracle was...

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...

This paper shows that those low and middle income countries that use infrastructure inefficiently pay a growth penalty in the form of a much smaller benefit from infrastructure investments. The magnitude of this penalty is apparent when the growth experience of Africa is compared with that of...

This paper argues that productivity puzzles like the Solow Paradox arise, in part, from the omission of an important dimension of the debate: the resource cost of achieving a given rate of technical change. A remedy is proposed in which a new parameter, defined as the cost elasticity of...

A number of recent papers have examined the role of environmental variables in accounting for economic growth, and have concluded that net measures of national product are superior to gross measures in portraying the outcome of the growth process. This paper argues that the two measures are not...

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the effects of health on economic growth. The micro-based approach tends to find smaller effects than the macro-based approach, thus presenting a micro-macro puzzle regarding the economic return on health. We reconcile these two...

We study private equity in a dynamic general equilibrium model and ask two questions: (i) Why does the investment of venture funds respond more strongly to the business cycle than that of buyout funds? (ii) Why are venture funds returns higher than those of buyout? On (i), venture brings in new...

Because positive spillovers give investment in innovation a social rate of return several times higher than its internal rate of return to innovators, innovation is chronically underfunded. Recurrent manias, panics and crashes in stock markets inundate "hot" new technologies with capital. To the...