Using historical data, we test the validity of Wagner's law of increasing state activity at different stages of economic development for five industrialized European countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy. In order to investigate the coherence between Wagner's law and...

Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human...

It is often assumed that recent success in the high-technology software industry will lead India's development. However, evidence suggests that basic manufacturing industry is stagnant. This paper proposes a mechanism that ties these two trends together. A big-push type of model, featuring...