This paper asks what low-income countries can expect from growth in terms of happiness. It interprets the set of available international evidence pertaining to the relationship between income growth and subjective well-being. Consistent with the Easterlin paradox, higher income is always...

Does corruption grease or sand the wheels of economic growth? This paper uses meta-analysis techniques to systematically evaluate the evidence addressing this question. It uses a data set comprising 460 estimates of the effect of corruption on growth from 41 empirical studies. The main factors...

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...

Various development objectives are worthy, but to my mind, one objective dominates all others: reducing the scourge of absolute economic misery in the world. In this paper, I focus on an important but relatively underemphasized approach to poverty reduction: helping the poor earn more in the...

In recent decades economists have turned their attention to data that asks people how happy or satisfied they are with their lives. Much of the early research concluded that the role of income in determining well-being was limited, and that only income relative to others was related to...

We investigate whether a causal interpretation of the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth is appropriate and whether cross-country evidence supports a case for the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking...

This paper investigates the high correlation in infant mortality across siblings using micro-data for each of the fifteen major states of India. The main finding is that, in thirteen of the fifteen states, there is evidence of a causal effect of a child death on the risk of death of the...

Peer referrals are a common strategy for addressing asymmetric information in contexts such as the labor market. They could be especially valuable for increasing testing and treatment of infectious diseases, where peers may have advantages over health workers in both identifying new patients and...

Between the early 1970s and very nearly the present, Indians' per capita calorie consumption declined. This decline, perplexing in the face of rising per capita income when malnutrition is rampant, has been termed India's Calorie Consumption Puzzle. It has been partially attributed to a squeeze...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...