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...

Greece's currently planned institutional reforms will help to get the country going with limited economic growth. With an economy based primarily on tourism, trade, and agriculture, Greece lacks an established competitive industry and an innovation-friendly environment, resulting in a low export...

We document the recent phenomenon of uphill flows of capital from nonindustrial toindustrial countries and analyze whether this pattern of capital flows has hurt growth innonindustrial economies that export capital. Surprisingly, we find that there is a positivecorrelation between current...

After the end of World War II in 1945, millions of refugees arrived in what in 1949 became the Federal Republic of Germany. We examine their effect on today's productivity, wages, income, rents, education, and population density at the municipality level. Our identification strategy is based on...

This paper analyzes the impact on age group wage differentials in a setting of imperfect labor substitution at different ages (years) of working life. We examine the wage prospect of assuming medium, high, and low levels of fertility during the population projection period (2020-2090). Main...

This paper offers a thesis for why the US overtook the UK and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per capita GDP as a case study of recent models of endogenous growth, where "human capital" is the engine of growth. By human capital we mean an intangible asset, best...

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...

We revisit the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditures. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of people...

China has achieved impressive growth over the last three decades. However, there has been debate over the sources of the growth, and the role of the intensive versus extensive margin. Growth accounting exercises at the aggregate level (Rawski and Perkins, 2008; Bosworth and Collins, 2008) suggest an...

In the 1990s, rural areas and small towns in the United States, which had been losing population, became the destinations for an increasing number of Hispanic immigrants and their families, slowing and in some cases reversing population declines. In this paper, we examine whether faster growth...