Indigenous peoples have three features in common: their historical heritage, their current culture and their extreme poverty. This paper presents a hypothesis about the development of a cultural factor: indigenous people prefer to work on a small scale. This cultural factor developed during the...

While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...

We set up a theoretical framework to analyze the possible role of economic growth and technological progress in the erosion of social capital. Under certain parameters, the relationship between technological progress and social capital can take the shape of an inverted U curve. We show the...

It is argued in order to explain large differences in the level of the development and the growth of economies cannot be adequately explained only by looking the traditional inputs of labour, capital and natural resources. The hypothesis is that also the role of social capital needs to be taken...

Since 1979, Colombia´s annual GDP growth has been on average two percentage points lower than what was observed between 1950 and 1980. The sources-of-growth decomposition shows that this deceleration can be accounted entirely by changes in productivity. Indeed, between 1960 and 1980...

In this paper, we analyze how skilled migration contributes to TFP growth in the sending countries when diaspora effects in technology diffusion are introduced. To investigate this issue, we start from a previous paper by Vandenbussche, Aghion and Meghir (2006), who examine the contribution of...

In this paper we analyze a two-sector growth model in which the utility function is not additively separable in consumption and “quality leisure time”. Differently from the main body of theoretical literature on quality leisure, we assume that the “productivity” of leisure is not...

This paper investigates the interplay between social capital, innovation and economic growth in the European Union. We identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into economic growth. In an empirical investigation of 102 European regions in the period 1990-2002,...

We develop a dynamic model to analyze the sources and the evolution of social participation and social capital in a growing economy characterized by exogenous technical progress. We start from the assumption that the well-being of agents basically depends on material and relational goods....

We examine the effect of generalized trust on long-term economic growth. Unlike in previous studies, we use Bayesian model averaging to deal rigorously with model uncertainty and attendant omitted variable bias. In addition, we address endogeneity and assess whether the effect of trust on growth...