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...

In this paper we propose a novel approach to obtain the predictive density of global GDP growth. It hinges upon a bottom-up probabilistic model that estimates and combines single countries' predictive GDP growth densities, taking into account cross-country interdependencies. Speci?cally, we...

The combination of stagnant growth and high levels of income inequality renewed the debate about whether a more even distribution of income can spur economic activity. This paper tests for cross-country convergence in income inequality and estimates its impact on economic growth with a...