This article presents new international estimates of human capital for the period 1970–2003. The new latent index is used to re-examine the Benhabib and Spiegel (2005) model of technology diffusion in a horse-race with the competing indicators of Barro and Lee (2010) and Hanushek and Wößmann...

Transition economies have an initial condition of high human capital relative to GDP per capita. But they will not necessarily realize their latent high growth potential. In the model, at a good equilibrium a large number of children of well-educated parents take advantage of their family...

This paper studies how the assignment of patents as collateral determines the savings of firms and magnifies the effect of innovative rents on investment in research and development (R&D). We analyse the behaviour of innovative firms that face random and lumpy investment opportunities in R&D....

Whether diversity or specialization of economic activity better promotes technological change and subsequent economic growth has been the subject of a heated debate in the economics literature. The purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of the composition of economic activity on...

What is the impact of modern transportation technology on long-run economic change in poor countries with high trade costs? Rail construction in colonial Sub-Saharan Africa provides a natural experiment: 90% of African railroad lines were built before independence, in a context where headloading...

I study the implications for the development of a country hosting of multinational firms. The paper argues that despite the negative impact on existing local firms, the presence of foreign firms induce the emergence of a new sector of domestic firms and that in the long term, the country to...

We develop a model in which public capital is both an engine of growth and a determinant of the distributions of wealth, income, and welfare. Government investment increases wealth inequality over time, regardless of its financing. The time path of income inequality is, however, highly sensitive...

In the classical literature of innovation-based endogenous growth, the main engine of long run economic growth is firm entry. Nevertheless, when projects are heterogeneous, and good ideas are scarce, a mass-composition trade off is introduced into this link: larger cohorts are characterized by a...

This paper studies how the assignment of patents as collateral determines the savings of firms and magnifies the effect of innovative rents on investment in research and development (R&D). We analyse the behaviour of innovative firms that face random and lumpy investment opportunities in R&D....