Numeracy skills of adults within and across 12 different countries in 2011 are strongly associated with the accumulated public investments in education received by these adults during their schooling. This paper confirms existing evidence that the timing of educational investments is important,...

We scrutinize Thomas Piketty's (2014) theory concerning the relationship between an economy's long-run growth rate, its capital-income ratio, and its factor income distribution put forth in his recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We find that a smaller long-run growth rate may be...

We analyze the effects of declining population growth on automation. A simple theoretical model of capital accumulation predicts that countries with lower population growth introduce automation technologies earlier. We test the theoretical prediction on panel data for 60 countries over the time...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

We analyze the adoption of green technology in a dynamic economy affected by random shocks where demand spillovers are the main driver of technological improvements. Firms' beliefs and consumers' anticipations drive the path of the economy. We derive the optimal policy of investment subsidy and...

The innovative approach presented introduces a modified neoclassical growth model which includes a new bias of technological progress in a quasi-endogenous growth model in which part of labor is used in the research & development sector. The combination of a macroeconomic production function and...

Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? Using subjective well-being data, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth are experienced. We find that measures of life satisfaction and affect are more than twice as sensitive to...

The paper revisits the debate on trickle-down growth in view of the widely discussed evolution of the earnings and income distribution that followed a massive public expansion of higher education. We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model to dynamically evaluate whether economic growth...

The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly...

This paper offers a reappraisal of the impact of migration on economic growth for 22 OECD countries between 1986-2006 and relies on a unique data set we compiled that allows us to distinguish net migration of the native- and foreign-born populations by skill level. Specifically, after...