This paper analyzes the historical determinants and long-term persistence of social capital, as well as its effect on economic development, by looking at the legacy of the commons in a Spanish region. In medieval times, common goods were granted to townships and were managed collectively by...

This paper estimates the total effect of power outages on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1995-2007. Outages are instrumented using a satellite-based measure of lightning density. As suggested by Henderson et al. (2011), we also combine Penn World Tables GDP data with...

We study a model of human capital driven growth, where the parent's human capital serves as a productive input in the child's human capital production only when that of the former exceeds a minimum level required to intellectually contribute to the child's learning. Private and public...

We examine how basic research should be financed. While basic research is a public good benefiting innovating entrepreneurs it also affects the entire economy: occupational choices of potential entrepreneurs, wages of workers, dividends to shareholders, and aggregate output. We show that the...

This paper studies the difference between public production and public finance of public goods in a dynamic general equilibrium setup. By public finance, we mean that the public good is produced by private providers with the government financing their costs. When the model is calibrated to match...

Students around the world are going to school but are not learning – an emerging gap in human capital formation. To understand this gap, this paper introduces a new data set measuring learning in 164 countries and territories. The data cover 98 percent of the world's population from 2000 to...

Öffentliche Investitionen werden im Gegensatz zu öffentlichem Konsum häufig als wachstumsfördernd angesehen. Ausgaben für "immaterielle" Güter wie etwa Bildung werden jedoch nicht als Investitionen angesehen, obwohl diese potenziell wachstumswirksam sind. Gleichzeitig werden auch Ausgaben...

The impact of structural funds of the European Union (EU) on regional economic growth is a matter of both political and economic importance. The large and regular payments made across the EU to countries and regions within them were and are meant to promote various aspects of growth and...

After the introduction of a nationwide Unified Payment Interface (UPI) in 2016, India has become one of the world's leading economies for cashless transactions. We exploit the heterogeneity in the intensity of the adoption of digital payments across districts to show that the household income...

As by product of economic growth, jobs are indeed transformational. In other words, efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do (as more productive jobs appear and less productive ones disappear). In fact societies flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and...