The literature on remittances is large and growing. However, its focus has mainly been on the effects of remittance inflows on the receiving economies. Little has been done on the sending economies. In this paper, we use data from Saudi Arabia, one of the top remitting countries in the world, to...

Many countries in the developed world are ageing in terms of their distribution of population. Conversely, a number of countries in the south have younger population. India for example, has 60% of its population in the age group of 15-59, with the mean age close to 27 years as of present times....

In many developing countries, the supply of skilled workers is likely to continue to be stronger than demand, and this should drive down the skill premium and reduce inequality. Within the limitations of any exercise based on simulations, this paper finds that the recently observed reduction in...

This paper examines the impact of education, governance and North-South trade- and distance-related technology diffusion on TFP in the South, focusing on South America (SA), Mexico, Latin America (LA) and East Asia for the 32-year period preceding the Great Recession (1976–2007) in a new model...

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...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

This paper develops a model in which the interaction of entrepreneurial investments and power of the owners of land or other natural resources determines structural change and economic development. A more equal distribution of natural resources promotes structural change and growth through two...

In this paper we explore the relationship between the individual decision to become an entrepreneur and the institutional context. We pinpoint the critical roles of property rights and the size of the state sector for entrepreneurial activity and test the relationships empirically by combining...

Expansion of the public sector and redistributive policies may reduce income inequality, but formal tests suffer from the problem of endogeneity of government size with respect to the distribution of income. Studying 30 European countries over the period 2004-2015, we apply instrumental variable...

This paper analyzes the political sustainability of the welfare state in an environment where immigration is the main demographic force and where governments are able to influence the size and skill composition of immigration flows. Specifically, I present a dynamic political-economy model where...