We assess the long-run growth effects of rising longevity and increasing the retirement age when growth is driven by purposeful research and development. In contrast to economies in which growth depends on learning-by-doing spillovers, raising the retirement age fosters economic growth. How...

Does the distribution of income within a country become more equal as it grows richer? This paper uses plausibly exogenous variations in trade-weighted world income and international oil price shocks as instruments for within-country variations in countries' real GDP per capita to examine this...

This paper examines the effect that windfalls from international commodity price booms have on net foreign assets in a panel of 145 countries during the period 1970-2007. The main finding is that windfalls from international commodity price booms lead to a significant increase in net foreign...

Education, general health, and reproductive health are key indicators of human development. Investments in these domains can also promote economic growth. This paper argues for the importance of human development related investments based on i) a theoretical economic growth model with poverty...

The positive cross-country correlation between health and economic growth is well-established, but the underlying mechanisms are complex and difficult to discern. Three issues are of central concern. First, assessing and disentangling causality between health and economic growth is empirically...