Because of its inappropriability, protection of property rights is widely recognized as being the state’s responsibility. Moreover, recent empirical evidence suggests that it leads to higher investment levels and faster growth. Nevertheless, the extent of property rights protection differs...

We analyse an economy where managers engage both in the adoption of technologies from the world frontier and in innovation activities. The selection of high-skill managers is more important for innovation activities. As the economy approaches the technology frontier, selection becomes more...

We study the joint dynamics of economic and political change. Predictions of the simple model that we formulate in the paper get considerable support in a panel of data on political regimes and GDP per capita for about 150 countries over 150 years. Democratic capital - measured by a nation's...

This Paper studies how discretionary fiscal policy affects output volatility and the rate of economic growth. Using data on fifty-one countries we isolate five empirical regularities: (1) Governments that use often fiscal policy make their economies volatile; (2) The use of fiscal policy is...

We examine the contribution of human capital to economy-wide technological improvements through the two channels of innovation and imitation. We develop a theoretical model showing that skilled labour has a higher growth-enhancing effect closer to the technological frontier under the reasonable...

We examine the view that high-quality macroeconomic policy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for economic growth. We first construct a new index of the quality of macroeconomic policy. We then directly compare growth rate distributions across countries with good and bad policies; use...