Showing 1 - 10 of 53
This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of Jamaican standards of living and income inequality around 1774. To this purpose we compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453817
abundant Europe and the high-wage, labor scarce New World. Those global forces contributed to a reduction in unskilled labor … scarcity in the New World and to a rise in unskilled labor scarcity in Europe. Thus, it contributed to rising inequality in … overseas countries, like the United States, and falling inequality in most of Europe. Falling unskilled labor scarcity and …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466110
Did independence push Latin America down a growth-inequality trade-off? During the late colonial decades, the region completed two centuries of growth unmatched anywhere and inequality reached spectacular heights. During the half century after insurgency and independence, inequality fell steeply...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462972
The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465599
This paper explores the relationship between the relative size of the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector, economic growth, and poverty alleviation using a new database on the share of SME labor in the total manufacturing labor force. Using a sample of 45 countries, we find a strong,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012467461
If we have learned anything from the recent outpouring of empirical growth equations is that life is far too complex to expect unconditional' convergence among all countries and at" all times. This fact motivates two questions. First, why has it taken economists so long to learn" the same lesson...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012472568
What is the impact of regulatory reforms that enhance credit market efficiency on children's human capital? Using a parent-child panel dataset, we find that such reforms reduced children's academic performance in low-income families. Consistent with the view that financial development entices...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012479202
"Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010521497
"Policymakers and economists disagree about the impact of bank regulations on the distribution of income. Exploiting cross-state and cross-time variation, we test whether liberalizing restrictions on intra-state branching in the United States intensified, ameliorated, or had no effect on income...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010521579
"While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, we study whether financial development disproportionately raises the incomes of the poor and alleviates poverty. Using a broad cross-country sample, we distinguish among competing theoretical predictions...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010522996