We use data from over 20,000 firms in 60 countries to identify constraints on the growth offirms. We interpret managers´ answers to survey questions on the extent to which variousaspects of their external environment inhibit the performance of their firm as measuring theshadow cost of...

In public good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of its membersfind it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, their inherentasymmetric nature may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informalsanctioning harder to accomplish...

In a novel experimental design we study public good games with dynamic interdependencies. Each agent's income at the end of a period serves as her endowment in the following period. In this setting growth and inequality arise endogenously allowing us to address new questions regarding their...

A growing concern on widening income gap between the rich and the poor, the policy mismatch in tackling the relative poverty and income inequality have invited increasing volumes of research focusing on the nexus between equity and efficient growth. Developed countries have experienced the...

This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from...

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...

This paper investigates the effects of financial development and political instability on economic growth in a power-ARCH framework with data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. Our findings suggest that (i) informal or unanticipated political instability (e.g., guerrilla warfare) has a direct...

Conventional wisdom about the relationship between income distribution and economicdevelopment has been subjected to dramatic transformations in the past century. Whileclassical economists advanced the hypothesis that inequality is beneficial for growth, theneoclassical paradigm dismissed the...

This article experimentally examines voluntary contributions when group members' marginal returns to the public good vary. The experiment implements two marginal return types, low and high, and uses the information that members have about the heterogeneity to identify the applied contribution...