Corporate governance distortions delay or even halt a country's transformation into a modern innovation economy. We investigate the mechanism through a growth model that allows for agency issues within firms. Governance distortions raise the cost of investment and depress the incentives to set...

One of Islam's five canonical pillars is a predictable, fixed, and mildly progressive tax system called zakat. It was meant to finance various causes typical of a pre-modern government. Implicit in the entire transfer system was personal property rights as well as constraints on government—two...

This paper integrates fertility choice and exhaustible resource dynamics in a tractable model of endogenous technological change. The analysis shows that, under the right conditions, the interdependence of population, resources and technology produces a transition from unsustainable...

In this paper, we build a new test of rational expectations based on the marginal distributions of realizations and subjective beliefs. This test is widely applicable, including in the common situation where realizations and beliefs are observed in two different datasets that cannot be matched....