A collection of eighteen articles have been purposely chosen to demonstrate the development of the original and significant contributions of my research over the period 1990 to 2008. Despite the relatively large number of articles, which cover a range of related issues, there is a surprisingly...

For centuries, economists have struggled to explain why people and businesses gather in cities.

The article characterises the capitalist development of Rio Grande do Sul region during the First Brazilian Republic (1889-1930). It sustains the hypothesis that the gaúcha society experimented a peculiar process of transition to capitalist relations of production, with divergent...

Interview with Claire Strom, author of Profiting From the Plains.

A review of the literature on historical comparisons of levels of development suggests that disparities between now and advanced and lagging countries around 1760 were most likely quite small and, if extreme observations at both ends are excluded, probably nonexistent. When purchasing power...

The development of the microchip sparked another industrial revolution. But will this revolution yield the long-term surge in productivity that the First and Second industrial revolutions produced?

<Para ID="Par1">Large, extensively diversified pyramidal business groups of listed firms dominate the histories of developed economies and the economies of developing economies. While such groups (called zaibatsu in Japan) are thought to have provided coordination for big push growth successfully in...</para>

We propose a new methodology to evaluate the gains from global risksharing that is closely connected to the empirical growth literature. We obtain estimates of residual risk (growth uncertainty) at various horizons from regressions of country-specific deviations from world growth on a wide set...

The study aimed at identifying factors limiting the Tietê and Paraná valleys economic growth. Specifically, it analyzed the importance of the capital stocks for economic growth of these and the other counties in São Paulo State. Nine factors were generated by Principal Components Method to...