We construct a model where the equilibrium organization of firms changes as an economy approaches the world technology frontier. In vertically integrated firms, owners (managers) have to spend time both on production and innovation activities, and this creates managerial overload, and...

Countries that have pursued distortionary macroeconomic policies, including high inflation, large budget deficits and misaligned exchange rates, appear to have suffered more macroeconomic volatility and also grown more slowly during the postwar period. Does this reflect the causal effect of...

This Paper documents that the rise of (Western) Europe between 1500 and 1850 is largely accounted for by the growth of European nations with access to the Atlantic, and especially by those nations that engaged in colonialism and long distance oceanic trade. Moreover, Atlantic ports grew much...

This paper reformulates the well known financial development conjecture (FDC) and supplies some new empirical evidence in its favour. The financial development conjecture, namely, that there exist strong feedback effects between real and financial development, is described in this paper by use...

How many years will the average transition economy need to reach the income level of the average OECD country? The favoured methodology in use to answer such questions is referred to as the BLR approach, because it uses specifications from Barro, and Levine and Renelt. The literature has so far...

An unstable macroeconomic environment is often regarded as detrimental to economic growth. Among the sources contributing to such instability, the literature has assigned most of the blame to political issues. This paper empirically tests for a causal and negative long-term relationship between...

This paper models technology adoption as replacing workers by machines, which perform the same job in the production process. The paper shows that such modelling of technology adoption affects significantly the analysis of economic growth. This model can explain large and persistent...

This paper builds a model of growth through industrialization, as machines replace workers in a growing number of tasks. This enables the economy to experience long-run growth, as machines become servants of humans, and as their number can grow unboundedly. The mechanism that drives growth is...

Does corruption grease or sand the wheels of economic growth? This paper uses meta-analysis techniques to systematically evaluate the evidence addressing this question. It uses a data set comprising 460 estimates of the effect of corruption on growth from 41 empirical studies. We find that the...

In a two-country Schumpeterian growth model, we study the incentives for basic research investments by governments in a globalized world. We find that a country's basic research investments increase with the country's level of human capital and decline with its own market size. This may explain...