We present a multi-country theory of economic growth in which countries are connected by a network of mutual knowledge exchange. Knowledge in any country depends on the human capital of the countries it exchanges knowledge with. The diffusion of knowledge throughout the world explains a period...

This paper introduces the Small World model (Watts and Strogatz, Nature, 1998) into the theory of economic growth and investigates how increasing economic integration affects firm size and effciency, norm enforcement, and aggregate economic performance. When economic integration is low and local...

We propose an innovation-driven growth model in which education is determined by family background and cognitive ability. We show that compulsory schooling can move a society from elite education to mass education, which then triggers market R&D. This means that our model rationalizes two...

This paper integrates into public economics a biologically founded, stochastic process of individual ageing. The novel approach enables us to investigate the interaction between health and retirement policy in order to quantitatively characterize the optimal joint design of the social insurance...

This paper integrates imperfect self-control into the standard model of endogenous growth. Individuals are conceptualized as “dual-selves” consisting of a long-run planner and a short-run doer. The long-run self can partly control the short-run self's strife for immediate gratification. It...

It is a well known fact that economic development and distance to the equator are positively correlated variables in the world today. It is perhaps less well known that as recently as 1500 C.E. it was the other way around. The present paper provides a theory of why the "latitude gradient"...

Für bestimmte Berufsgruppen untersuchen wir Gesundheit und Altern vor und nach der Pensionierung. Wir verwenden fünf Wellen des Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) und erstellen einen Gebrechlichkeitsindex für ältere Männer und Frauen aus 10 europäischen Ländern....

In this paper we examine the long-run relationship between religiosity and income using retrospective data on church attendance rates for a panel of countries from 1925 to 1990. We employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias and test...

We propose a model of aging and health deficit accumulation model with an infinite time horizon and a steady state of constant health. The time of death is uncertain and endogenous to lifestyle and health behavior. This setup can be conceptualized as a strive for immortality that is never...