We study whether higher gender equality facilitates economic growth by enabling better allocation of a valuable resource: female labor. By allocating female labor to its more productive use, we hypothesize that reducing gender inequality should disproportionately benefit industries with...

What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible....

States' fiscal capacity plays a pivotal role in developing economies, but it is less clear what its determinants are or what explains cross-country differences. We focus on the impact of natural resources. Standard arguments suggest that natural resources rents may reduce incentives to invest in...

In this paper we show that inconclusive results in previous empirical studies on human capital and growth might be due to omitted variable bias. Using data for about 130 countries, we show that after inclusion of variables related to the social capabilities concept of Abramovitz (1986) i.e....

The Gender Kuznets Curve (GKC) hypothesis argues that economic development has a non-linear effect on the female share of workers. There is, however, growing debate on the exact shape of this non-linear relationship. The aim of this paper is to test the GKC hypothesis in order to determine...

Purpose - The article aims at discovering classes and clusters of EU member-states considering their levels of economic development and gender equality to foster the enhancement of EU cohesion policy. Research methodology - The methodology includes the grouping by two parameters, economic...

A kind of gender revolution is passing through various countries in various continents. By being offered free access to educational infrastructure, women become better educated, improve their skills and capabilities, gain possibilities to enter the labour market and use financial resources to...

This essay reviews the historical and ongoing role played by trade in sustained high growth and human development progress, and makes the case that the post-2015 development agenda should include considerations related to trade rules and supply-side capacity. Given the strong links between...

We use recent immigration data from 195 countries and propose an index of population diversity based on people's birthplaces. This new index is then decomposed into a size (share of foreign born) and a variety (diversity of immigrants) component and is available for 1990 and 2000 disaggregated...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically, that geographical variations in natural land productivity and their impact on the return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on...