In a recent paper, Barrett (2006) reaches the conclusion that in general the answer to the question in the title is no. We show in this paper that a focus on the R&D phase in the development of breakthrough technologies changes the picture. The stability of international treaties improves and...

Different countries have been following different reform paths since the early 1990s. We develop a simple dynamic model of policy reform that captures some of the determinants that underlie these differences. The model emphasizes the interaction between domestic institutions and international...

Achieving efficiency for many global environmental problems requires voluntary cooperation among sovereign countries due to the public good nature of pollution abatement. The theory of international environmental agreements (IEAs) in economics seeks to understand how cooperation among countries...

The link between foreign aid and economic growth remains a controversial issue in the literature, and a large share of the disagreement could be explained by differences in the data employed. Using GDP data from three different versions of the Penn World Table and the World Development...

This paper provides a critical analysis of the growth regressions in Burnside and Dollar (2000). First, we analyze the relation between aid and government expenditure in a modified neoclassical growth model. We find that while good policies spur growth they may at the same time lead to...