We analyze the impact of increasing longevity on technological progress within an R&D-based endogenous growth framework and test the model's implications on OECD data from 1960 to 2011. The central hypothesis derived in the theoretical part is that - by raising the incentives of households to...

This paper identifies factors associated with takeoff - a sustained period of high growth following a period of stagnation. We examine a panel of 241 stagnation episodesʺ from 146 countries, 54 % of these episodes are followed by takeoffs. Countries that experience takeoffs average 2.3% annual...

This study constructs a simple, two-sector Malthusian model with agriculture and industry, and use it to identify the determinants of subsistence income. We make standard assumptions about preferences and production technology, but by contrast to existing studies we assume that children and...

Successful economic development is usually characterized by two salient phenomena: industrialization and demographic transition. Chronologically both events happen so closely to each other that historians and economists alike suspect that they are interrelated. This paper develops a theory for...

In this paper, we show, using a panel of developed countries, that there is a long-run negative association between church attendance and total factor productivity (TFP) with predictive causality running from declining church attendance to increasing factor productivity. According to our...

We investigate the effect of higher education on the evolution of inequality. In so doing we propose a novel overlapping generations model with three social classes: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. We show that there is an initial phase in which no social class invests in higher...

We analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health. In so doing we introduce a novel micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium framework in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for...

We analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health. In so doing we introduce a novel micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium framework in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for...

We investigate the effect of higher education on the evolution of inequality. In so doing we propose a novel overlapping generations model with three social classes: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. We show that there is an initial phase in which no social class invests in higher...

We analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health. We do this through developing and calibrating a novel micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium model in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in...