This paper is dedicated to the empirical exploration of the welfare effect of expectations and progress per se. Using ten waves of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a panel household survey rich in subjective variables, the analysis suggests that for a given total stock of...

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...

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...