We consider fertility choice and weather in analyzing the effect of farmland abundance in economic development. We find that quality-adjusted agricultural land abundance may confer a type of "resource curse", in that it prolongs the tenure of an economy in the Malthusian regime. This lends new...

There is a debate over the reliability of the Chinese data (e.g., Young, 2003; Holz, 2003, 2006). In this paper we test the Chinese provincial panel data for the period 1978-2002 against the predictions from the technology diffusion model. We find that the estimated coefficient on initial real GDP...

We re-examine the finance-growth nexus using the Chinese financial deregulation experience during the reform period 1981-1998. We use lagged home-bias political variables as instruments for financial deregulation. Dealing with weak instruments by LIML (limited-information maximum likelihood)...

Following Miguel et al. (2004), we use temperature and hours of sunshine variations as instrumental variables for economic growth in 27 Chinese provinces during 1981--98. Our 2SLS (Two-stage least squares) regression finds that growth has no significant effect on financial deregulation after...

We study how entrepreneurs and households share the monopolistic profit from inventions would affect growth. The share to the entrepreneur is called entrepreneur's inventive incentive (EII). First, there are two representative agents (a borrowing entrepreneur and a household who provides the...

This paper studies how the real exchange rate changes with economic growth. Although Devereux (1999) proves that endogenous growth in the distribution sector can cause exchange rate depreciation, MacDonald and Rucci (2005) empirically find that growth in the distribution sector significantly...

We propose creative destruction as the channel for inflation to impact growth. The banks reap revenue from higher rates of credit growth, attracting more labor into banks and decreasing the profit of entrepreneurs. But when the revenue is achieved by issuing more credit to entrepreneurs, part of...

This paper develops a simple mercantilism model for a small open economy and examines the real effects of macroeconomic policies. In this setting, the saddle-point stability of the model with wealth effects hinges on an interesting "relative smoothness condition" for foreign asset accumulation....

Empirical evidence shows that entrepreneurs hold a large fraction of wealth, have higher saving rates than workers, and face substantial uninsurable entrepreneurial and investment risks. This paper constructs a heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model with uninsurable entrepreneurial risk...

In this paper, we have studies the effects of macroeconomic policies on foreign asset accumulation in a wealth effect model used by Bardhan (1967), Kurz (1968), Calvo (1980) and Blanchard (1983). Our results differ dramatically from the ones in Obstfeld (1981). In particular, we have shown that...