Showing 1 - 10 of 31
We exploit differences in the mortality rates faced by European colonialists to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Our argument is that Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. The choice of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470979
Among countries colonized by European powers during the past 500 years those that were relatively rich in 1500 are now relatively poor. We document this reversal using data on urbanization patterns and population density, which, we argue, proxy for economic prosperity. This reversal is...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012470258
Thomas Piketty's (2014) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012457900
the U.S. would experience a sudden stop of capital flows, which would unavoidably drag the world economy into a deep … instead that the root imbalance was of a different kind: The entire world had an insatiable demand for safe debt instruments … of exposing the economy to a systemic panic. This structural problem can be alleviated if governments around the world …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463014
Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012616615
Global risk-off shocks can be highly destabilizing for financial markets and, absent an adequate policy response, may …-put framework that reduced the persistence of risk-off shocks. We also show that domestic macroeconomic and financial conditions … play a key role in benefiting from the spillovers of these policies during risk-off episodes. Countries like Japan, which …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012479979
We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes the form of the introduction new goods, whose production requires skilled workers. Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these new goods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462712
Despite the major advances in information technology that have shaped the recent wave of globalization, openness to trade is still a political choice, and trade policy can change with shifts in domestic political equilibria. This paper suggests that a particular threat and a limiting factor to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462958
behind this crisis is the large demand for riskless assets from the rest of the world. In this paper we present a model to … downturn by concentrating risk onto its balance sheet. In addition to highlighting the role of capital flows in facilitating … concern with capital flows is in their speculative nature, in the U.S. the risk in capital inflows derives from the opposite …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012463959
In this paper we argue that the persistent global imbalances, the subprime crisis, and the volatile oil and asset prices that followed it, are tightly interconnected. They all stem from a global environment where sound and liquid financial assets are in scarce supply
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464126