We study the effects on financial markets and real economic activity of changes in risk related to political events and policy announcements in Italy during the 2013-2019 period that saw the rise to power of populist parties. We focus on events that have implications for budgetary policy, debt...

The existence of an environmental limit in the Solow-Swan economy changes the nature of economic growth, but does not preclude it. When atmospheric greenhouse gases reach a predetermined absolute threshold, further growth requires a permanently expanding, resource-intensive mitigation effort. If...

The demographic transition is introduced into the otherwise standard Ramsey model to generate multiple equilibria, poverty traps, and demography-driven cycles. The model is calibrated for global data to explore the demographic conditions under which multiplicity is realized. Three cases arise,...

What is the relationship between economic growth and its volatility? Does political instability affect growth directly or indirectly, through volatility? This paper tries to answer such questions using a power-ARCH framework with annual time series data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. We show...

What are the main causes of international terrorism? The lessons from the surge of academic research that followed 9/11 remain elusive. The careful investigation of the relative roles of economic and political conditions did little to change the fact that existing econometric estimates diverge...

Using cross-country data, we find evidence for a significant negative interaction effect between democracy and inequality in determining the quality of growth-promoting institutions like rule of law. Democracy is associated with institutions of higher quality when inequality is lower.

We test whether the growth experience of a sample of 21 OECD countries over the past three decades is more consistent with the augmented Solow model or the Uzawa-Lucas model, by exploiting the different non-linear restrictions implied by them as regards the relationship between factor shares and...

Does a country's level of unemployment have an impact on the long-run growth rate? Incorporating unemployment into a generalised augmented Solow-type growth model, yields some answers to this question. In particular, we show that the impact of unemployment on productivity growth heavily depends...

We construct an endogenous growth model that includes a cultural variable along the dimension of individualism-collectivism. The model predicts that more individualism leads to more innovation because of the social rewards associated with innovation in an individualist culture. This cultural...