We propose an innovation-driven growth model in which education is determined by family background and cognitive ability. We show that compulsory schooling can move a society from elite education to mass education, which then triggers market R&D. This means that our model rationalizes two...

We study the link between public enforcement of property rights, innovation investments, and economic growth in an endogenous growth framework with an expanding set of product varieties. We find that a government may assure positive equilibrium growth through public employment in the enforcement...

The empirical literature on economic growth and development has moved from the study of proximate determinants to the analysis of ever deeper, more fundamental factors, rooted in long-term history. A growing body of new empirical work focuses on the measurement and estimation of the effects of...

We undertake a trade-growth accounting exercise by decomposing data on changes in bilateral international trade flows into their direct (endowment accumulation, productivity growth, changes in trade costs, changing preferences) and indirect components (general equilibrium effects). Furthermore,...

This paper argues that growth theory needs a more general quot;regularityquot; concept than that of exponential growth. This offers the possibility of considering a richer set of parameter combinations than in standard growth models. Allowing zero population growth in the Jones (1995) model...

Using data on a panel of 56 democratic countries in the period 1975-2004, we find evidence of a negative association between political stability and economic growth which is stronger and empirically more robust in countries with high bureaucratic costs. Motivated by these results, which contrast...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...

This paper studies the formation of human capital and its transmission across generations when premature adult mortality is a salient feature of the demographic landscape, either permanently or in the form of a long-period wave that follows the outbreak of an epidemic. We establish several...

This paper studies the implications of introducing child care in the human capital production function when assessing the effects of labor income taxation on growth. We develop an OLG model where formal schooling and child care enter the human capital production function as complements and we...

We consider a small open economy in which the level of public education funding is determined by popular vote. We show that growth can be enhanced by the introduction of pay-as-you-go pensions even if the growth rate of aggregate wages falls short of the interest rate. The reason is that the...