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...

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...

We explore the role of government in the nexus of finance and trade starting from the earliest days of organised finance in England and then broadening the analysis to 84 countries from 1960 to 2004. For 18th century England, we find that the government expenditures and international trade did...

We explore the relationships between subjective well-being and income, as seen across individuals within a given country, between countries in a given year, and as a country grows through time. We show that richer individuals in a given country are more satisfied with their lives than are poorer...

We examine econometrically the real effects of paper money's introduction into colonial New England over the 1703-1749 period. Departing from earlier analyses that focus primarily on the depreciation of paper money in the region, we show that expansion of the money stock promoted growth in...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

PPP-based national accounts have become an important part of the database for macroeconomists, development economists, and economic historians. Frequently used global data come from the Penn World Table (PWT) and the World Bank's World Development Indicators; a substantial fraction of the world...