In this paper we study the decline of West Bengal relative to Maharashtra, historically two of the most important states of India. In 1960, West Bengal's per capita income exceeded that of Maharashtra, the third richest state at the time. By 1993, it had fallen to just 69 percent of...

We provide microeconomic foundations for the commonly assumed subsistence constraint on consumption and demonstrate that the theory is consistent with several important features of development. In principle, subsistence is consistent with different combinations of food consumption, energy...

We study the competitive equilibria of a two-country endogenous growth model in which the source of growth is the linearity of technology in reproducible inputs. We begin by showing that in a model with no externalities there is a unique equilibrium; however, there are multiple ways in which the...

This paper investigates whether technological shocks, constructed to be consistent with the observed cross-country income dispersion, are also capable of accounting for development regularities related to capital accumulation. This question is approached via a quantitative theoretical analysis...