Showing 1 - 10 of 73
This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of Jamaican standards of living and income inequality around 1774. To this purpose we compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012453817
abundant Europe and the high-wage, labor scarce New World. Those global forces contributed to a reduction in unskilled labor … scarcity in the New World and to a rise in unskilled labor scarcity in Europe. Thus, it contributed to rising inequality in … overseas countries, like the United States, and falling inequality in most of Europe. Falling unskilled labor scarcity and …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012466110
Did independence push Latin America down a growth-inequality trade-off? During the late colonial decades, the region completed two centuries of growth unmatched anywhere and inequality reached spectacular heights. During the half century after insurgency and independence, inequality fell steeply...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012462972
The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012465599
If we have learned anything from the recent outpouring of empirical growth equations is that life is far too complex to expect unconditional' convergence among all countries and at" all times. This fact motivates two questions. First, why has it taken economists so long to learn" the same lesson...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012472568
Over the years, there emerged two key policy differences between Europe and America, both welfare and migration …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012458218
This study grounds the establishment of EMU and the euro in the context of the history of international monetary cooperation and of monetary unions, above all in the U.S., Germany and Italy. The purpose of national monetary unions was to reduce transactions costs of multiple currencies and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012464832
Oates reminds us that tax competition among localities in the presence of capital mobility, may lead to inefficiently low tax rates (and benefits). In contrast, the Tiebout paradigm suggests that tax competition yields an efficient outcome, so that there are no gains from tax coordination. This...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012461987
The paper develops an international macroeconomic model of FDI flows with a unique feature: a hands-on management ability to react in real time to changing economic environments. Anticipating this advantage, foreign direct investors can outbid other investors in a certain industry in which they...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012469705
In a static setup, migration of unskilled labor may be resisted by the entire native-born population because, being relatively low earners, migrants are net beneficiaries of the fiscal system. However, the paper shows that with a pay-as-you-go pension, an important pillar of the welfare state,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012471787