Recently, there has been a growing interest in social capital and in the difficulties related to its measurement. In this paper, we propose to measure social capital by means of principal components analysis. Then, we present the first available international social capital estimates for the...

This paper develops a simple model to analyze how a lack of politi-cal competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. Wetest the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. Inthese data, we …nd robust evidence that lack of political competitionin a state is...

Whether or not the marginal product of capital (MPK) differs across countriesis a question that keeps coming up in discussions of comparative economic developmentand patterns of capital flows. Using easily accessible macroeconomic datawe find that MPKs are remarkably similar across countries....

Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-passattempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of productionand efficiency. It answers the question “how much of the cross-country income variance canbe attributed to...

In this paper we apply the same framework totime-series data from the United States over theperiod 1963–1992. We find that throughout thisperiod the efficiencies of skilled labor and capitalhave risen. The efficiency of unskilled laborhas risen in tandem with those of the otherfactors in the...

There are two sources of inconsistency in existing cross-country empiricalwork on growth: correlated individual effects and endogenous explanatoryvariables. We estimate a variety of cross- country growth regressions usinga generalized method of moments estimator that eliminates both problems.In...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justification forcapital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought tobe taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to benonlinear functions of income and consumption and find that, when ability...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justi…cation for capital income taxation: goodspreferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxesare allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption and …nd that, when ability...

[...]Our analysis suggests that, when we look across banks, themarket risk capital figures provide little additional informationabout the extent of an institution’s market risk exposurebeyond that conveyed by simply knowing the relative size of thetrading account. In contrast, when we look at...

[...]The purpose of this article is to build on this earlier work, bythe Basel Committee and others, and to consider the issues thatwould have to be addressed in developing a regulatory minimumcapital standard based on banks’ internal credit risk models. Inconducting this exercise, we consider...