This essay reviews the relationship between natural-resource abundance and economic growth around the world, and presents some new results. The principal reasons why resource-based production can inhibit economic growth over long periods are traced to the Dutch disease, neglect of education,...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

This paper examines whether growth regressions should incorporate dualism and structural change. If there is a differential across sectors in the marginal product of labour, changes in the structure of employment can raise aggregate total factor productivity. The paper develops empirical growth...

This paper presents estimates of world output growth from 1970 to 2000, the distribution of income among countries and persons for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000, and world poverty rates for the same years. It also presents the results of a series of simulation exercises that attempt isolate the...

In many OECD countries income inequality has risen, but surprisingly redistribution as well. The theory attributes this partly to the redistributive effect of education spending. In the model income inequality and growth depend in an inverted U-shaped way on education. To maintain a given level...

The number of variables related to long-run economic growth is large compared with the number of countries. Bayesian model averaging is often used to impose parsimony in the cross-country growth regression. The underlying prior is that many of the considered variables need to be excluded from...

This paper does three things. First, based on a limited number of theoretically established dimensions, it proposes a new de facto indicator for the rule of law. It is the first such indicator to take the quality of legal norms explicitly into account. Second, using this indicator we shed new...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

We examine the two-level nested Constant Elasticity of Substitution production function where both capital and labor are disaggregated in two classes. We propose a normalized system estimation method to retrieve estimates of the inter- and intra-class elasticities of substitution and factor...

By merging individual data on valuable patents granted in Prussia in the late nineteenth century with county level information on literacy and income tax revenues we show that increases in the stock of human capital not only improved workers ́productivity but also accelerated innovative...