A unified growth theory is developed that accounts for the roughly constant living standards displayed by world … economies prior to 1800 as well as the growing living standards exhibited by modern industrial economies. Our theory also …

in this intermediation amounted to at least 3.4 percent of GNP. The theory implies that financial intermediation services …

goods and find that the 1990s are not puzzling in light of this new theory. There is compelling micro and macro evidence for … our extension, and the predictions of the theory are in conformity with U.S. national products, incomes, and capital gains …. We use the theory to compare current accounting measures for labor productivity and investment with the corresponding …

fiscal shocks. We test the theory using data from World War II, which is by far the largest fiscal shock in the history of … data. Our main finding is that the theory quantitatively accounts for macroeconomic activity during this big fiscal shock …