Fifty years ago, Punjab embarked on its famous Green Revolution, leading the rest of India in that innovation, and becoming the country's breadbasket. Now its economy and society are struggling by relative, and sometimes even absolute, measures. Using the original Green Revolution as a...

Are the Neolithic revolution’s effects still impacting incomes across the world today? I find strong support for this proposition using new, country-specific estimates of the timing of agricultural transition. While support with my data is slightly weaker than with the coarser data of Hibbs...

This paper establishes that the Caloric Suitability Index (CSI) dominates the commonly used measure of agricultural suitability in the examination of the effect of land productivity on comparative economic development. The analysis demonstrates that the agricultural suitability index does not...

Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

While most countries have harmonized intellectual property rights (IPR) legislation, the dispute about the optimal level of IPR-enforcement remains. This paper develops an endogenous growth framework with two open economies satisfying the classical North-South assumptions to study (a)...

India's creative economy is large, but its untapped potential is even larger. This study provides the first reliable measure on the size of India's creative economy, explores the many challenges faced by the creative industries, and provides recommendations to make India one of the most creative...

We use a panel of historical patent data covering a large range of countries over the past century to study the evolution of innovation across time and space and its effect on productivity. We document a substantial rise of international knowledge spillovers as measured by patent citations since...

This research explores the effects of within-group heterogeneity on group-level productivity. It establishes that observed genetic diversity of 230 worldwide ethnic groups, as well as predicted genetic diversity of 1,331 ethnic groups across the globe, has a hump-shaped effect on economic...

In Ghate & Wright Journal of Development Economics, vol. 99 (2012) pp 58-67, we noted that there was considerable variation in the extent to which different Indian states participated in the Great Indian Growth Turnaround. In this paper we investigate whether there was any systematic...

Collective skill formation systems were central to sustaining a high-road approach to economic development in industrial societies while maintaining social inclusion. But can they still deliver in knowledge-based societies, both economically and socially? This article argues that nothing...