Maddison's international panel data show that technically it was the faster growth rate of the US economy that led to its overtaking the UK as economic superpower. We explore the contributing factors. Identifying the land-grant colleges system triggered by the 1862/1890 Morrill Acts (MAs) as a...

How did post-communist transformations affect people's perceptions of their economic and political systems? We model a pseudo-panel with 89 country-year clusters, based on 13 countries observed between 1991 and 2004, to identify the macro and institutional drivers of the public opinion. Our main...

This paper is dedicated to the relation between market development and democracy. We distinguish contexts and preferences and ask whether it is true that the demand for democracy only emerges after a certain degree of market development is reached, and whether, conversely, democratization is...

This paper combines different strands of the productivity literature to investigate the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. On the one hand, a growing body of empirical research has been relating cross-country differences in key economic outcomes, such...

In this paper, we study convergence in per capita gross regional products across Russian regions in the period from 1996 to 2017. To this purpose, we estimate growth equations, which are directly derived from a neoclassical growth model, augmented with human capital and migration. To our...

China has achieved tremendous economic progress in the last three decades, but there is much work to be done to make the economy resilient to large shocks, ensure the sustainability of its growth, and translate this growth into corresponding improvements in the economic welfare of its citizens....

This paper develops a long-run growth model for a major oil exporting economy and derives conditions under which oil revenues are likely to have a lasting impact. This approach contrasts with the standard literature on the "Dutch disease" and the "resource curse", which primarily focuses on...

We develop a model which shows that wages, prices and real income should grow faster in countries with low increase in their labour force. If not, other countries experience growing unemployment and/or trade deficit. This result is applied to the case of Germany, which has displayed a...

Current empirical growth models limit the determinants of country growth to geographic, economic, and institutional variables. This study draws on conflict variables from the Correlates of War (COW) project to ask a critical question: How do different types of conflict affect country growth...

This note investigates the effects of the education level, product market rigidities and employment protection legislation on growth. It exploits macro-panel data for OECD countries. For countries close to the technological frontier, education and rigidities are significantly related to TFP...