Recent work in the growth literature has provided various explanations for transition delays and the great divergence. This paper provides empirical support for one theory of transition delays: initial land inequality. Our analysis is designed to elucidate the channels via which land inequality...

We introduce easy to implement regression-based methods for predicting quarterly real economic activity that use daily financial data and rely on forecast combinations of Mixed Data Sampling (MIDAS) regressions. We also extract a novel small set of daily financial factors from a large panel of...