"For over a century now, historians have debated the causes of the lagged industrialization of the Dutch economy during the nineteenth century. To this debate, Trials of Convergence brings the analytical perspective of prices, factor costs and the functioning of markets. Its critical insight is...

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....