Technological progress takes the form of improvements in the quality of an array of intermediate inputs to production. In an equilibrium that is standard in the literature, all research is carried out by outsiders, and success means that the outsider replaces the incumbent as the industry...

We present a model in which two of the most important features of the long-run growth process are reconciled: the massive changes in the structure of production and employment; and the Kaldor facts of economic growth. We assume that households expand their consumption along a hierarchy of needs...

The paper analyses the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence linking enterprise performance in transition economies to the macroeconomic environment. Macroeconomic instability is traced to the unsustainability of the fiscal-financial and monetary programmes of the state and to regulatory...

Poor families around the world spend a large fraction of their income on consumption of goods that appear to be useless in alleviating poverty, while saving at very low rates and neglecting investment in health and education. Such consumption patterns seem to be related to the persistence of...

Commodity prices are usually very slow to recover from adverse shocks. This is one of the reasons why it has proven so difficult either to smooth their effect or to stabilize them, and why it is sometimes argued that they should behave as if shocks were permanent. There is no reason however why...

The long-run price elasticity of demand for credit is a key parameter for intertemporal modeling, policy levers, and lending practice. We use randomized interest rates, offered across 80 regions by Mexico’s largest microlender, to identify a 29-month dollars-borrowed elasticity of -1.9. This...

This Paper proposes a model of endogenous growth where innovating requires both researchers, who produce inventions, and entrepreneurs who implement them. As research and entrepreneurship compete in the allocation of aggregate resources, the relation between growth and research effort is...

We investigate the long-run consequences of historic, climatic temperatures (1730-2000) for the modern cross-country income distribution. Using a newly constructed dataset of climatic temperatures stretching over three centuries (18th, 19th, and 20th), we estimate a robust and significant...

This research suggests that the evolution of entrepreneurial spirit played a significant role in the process of economic development and the evolution of inequality within and across societies. The study argues that entrepreneurial spirit evolved non-monotonically in the course of human history....

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...