Exploiting a unique empirical setting, 1,000 vendors in 90 traditional food markets in Lima, we document that historic social ties among market founders are associated, decades later, with stricter formal (third party) enforcement of market rules, more collective action, and the greater...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

A renewed interest in explaining growth in the Caribbean countries is motivated by the somewhat slow but uneven performance in the past decade: per capita GDP gaps in Caribbean countries have widened in relation to the United States, whereas standard theories would predict convergence. This...

The existing literature on Indian growth finds no evidence of convergence across states. This represents a puzzle given the relatively free flows of capital, labor and commodities across state borders. We use a new data set of district level income and socio-economic data to explore the...

This paper uses the standard one-sector neoclassical growth model to investigate why China’s consumption has been low and investment high. It finds that the low cost of capital has been quantitatively an important factor. Theory predicts that the price of capital may have been significantly...

We study a quality-ladder model of endogenous growth that produces stochastic leadership cycles. Over a cycle, industry leaders can innovate several successive times in the same industry, gradually increasing the magnitude of their technological lead before being replaced by a new entrant....

Some recent papers by Dell et al. (2009) and Dell et al. (2012) (DJO) relating weather and economic outcomes, have delivered meaningful messages with clear implications to the effects of a changing climate. In a nutshell, the authors claim that a 1°C increase in global average temperatures...

This paper deals with some structural indicators and their evolution, in China and regions, over the period 1981-2010. We first produce estimates of the optimal productivities of incremental capital and the optimal incremental income elasticity of capital by means of a linear programming...

We construct a tractable endogenous growth model with production externalities in which the public capital stock augments investment specific technological change. We characterize the first best fiscal policy and show that there exist several labor and capital tax-subsidy combinations that...

We study the sectoral allocation of public infrastructure investments in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors in India. In addition to the changing employment and output shares of these two sectors, the capital output ratio in agriculture in India has fallen, while it has risen in...