There is wide consensus that entrepreneurial talent is the ability to discover and exploit market opportunities by taking the relevant risky decisions. Discovery and exploitation are separate but interlinked features of entrepreneurship requiring, in different proportions, the exploitation of...

This paper presents the first empirical assessment of the causal relationship between social capital and health in Italy. The analysis draws on the 2000 wave of the Multipurpose Survey on Household conducted by the Italian Institute of Statistics on a representative sample of the population (n =...

This paper uses a dataset built by the author on the basis of raw data taken from different national surveys to carry out an investigation into the socio-economic determinants of couples’ childbearing decisions in Italy. Since having children is in most cases a “couple matter”, the...

We present new data documenting the secular decline in fertility in the states of the United States, the dramatic convergence in fertility, child schooling, parental schooling, survival probabilities. In addition we document the disparate nature of the Baby Boom in the United States. There were...

This paper presents new estimates of the benets of equal education opportunity for blacks over the period 1820-2000. For the better part of US history, blacks have enjoyed less access to schooling for their children than whites. This paper attempts to quantify the value of this discrimination....

We present new data on real output per worker, schooling per worker, human capital per worker, real physical capital per worker for 168 countries. The output data represent all available data from Maddison. The physical capital data represent all available data from Mitchell. One major...

We present a general equilibrium dynamic model that characterizes the gap between optimal and equilibrium fertility and investment in human capital. In the model, the aggregate production function exhibits increasing returns to population arising from specialization but households face the...

This extended data appendix describes the sources and methods used to construct the data used in our paper "Economic Growth in the Long Run."

We present a model of public provision of education for blacks in two discriminatory regimes, white plantation controlled, and white town controlled. We show that the ability to migrate to a non-discriminating district constrains the ability of both types of whites to discriminate. The model...

There is a surprising gap in the economic literature on social capital. First, we lack studies addressing the effects of social capital on those facets of development that can contribute in making growth more sustainable in the long run, like, for example, human development and social cohesion....