The reasons why inventions that shaped industrial revolutions, occurred in the UK and in the USA, have been suggested by economic historians. For the first time,we access the determinants of more than a hundred inventions around the world, explaining why they occurred in a given country and why...

The determinants of human capital have been studied sparsely in the literature. Although there is a huge literature on the determinants of schooling linked with the quality of schooling, there are not many contributions that explore the deep determinants of investment in, quantity and quality of...

A fruitful recent theoretical literature has related human capital and technological development with income (and wages) inequality. However, empirical assessments on the relationship are still scarce. We relate human capital and total factor productivity (TFP) with inequality and discover that,...

Until now there was little evidence of the influence of large governments on happiness and when it existed, it was positive. We show that structural government consumption and other measures of long-term government imbalances significantly decrease happiness and life satisfaction in European...

We analyse the implications of public debt on economic growth and inflation in a group of 52 African economies between 1950 and 2012. The results indicate that the limits of public debt affect economic growth and exhibit negatively, from a given level of debt, an inverted U behaviour regarding...