This paper surveys the literature which examines the effect of education on economic growth. Specifically, we apply meta-regression analysis to 57 studies with 989 estimates and show that there is substantial publication selection bias toward a positive impact of education on growth. Once we...

Over last few decades, there has been a growing interest among researchers in understanding the link between trade liberalization and regional disparities within the context of an individual country. In this study, we develop the first ever single-country multiregional Computable General...

We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

Australia is experiencing its largest mining boom for more than a century and a half. This paper explores, from a national perspective, important economic differences that arise when a mining boom, such as the current one, is generated by sustained export price increases (trading gains) rather...

This paper discusses how regime type and state capacity may interact in affecting economic growth. The empirical analysis finds a positive and robust effect of democracy on growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, a continent historically characterized by weak-capacity states. Furthermore, the paper...

Several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough. We try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure, using alternative measures of both...

Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

This is an attempt to derive broad, strategic lessons from the diverse experience with economic growth in last 50 years. The paper revolves around two key arguments. One is that neo-classical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally...

We revisit one of the central empirical findings of the political economy literature that higher income per capita causes democracy. Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy, but do not typically control for factors that simultaneously affect...

We investigate the impact of within-country spatial concentration of economic activity on country-level growth, using cross-section OLS and dynamic panel GMM estimation. Agglomeration is measured alternatively through measures of urbanization and through indices of spatial concentration based on...