Statistics on the size and growth of the U.S. federal government, along with the rhetoric of President Franklin Roosevelt, seem to indicate that the Great Depression was the event that started the dramatic growth in government spending and intervention in the private sector that has continued to...

During the past 200 years, most countries have entered a period of modern economic growth-consistent increases in output, input, and productivity per worker that were rare in previous centuries. Even so, a few regions of the world have experienced stagnant or falling living standards in recent...

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...