Both empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that preference heterogeneity is a necessary feature of any model that is able to account for observed heterogeneity in wealth and lifetime income and consumption profiles. Why do tastes differ across people? We propose a framework in which people...

This paper describes a simple model of technology adoption which combines the two engines of growth emphasized in the recent growth literature: human capital accumulation and technological progress. Our model economy does not create new technologies, it simply adopts those that have been created...

Social Security programmes around the world link public pensions to retirement: people do not lose their pensions if they make a million dollars a year in the stock market, but they do confront marginal tax rates of up to 100% if they choose to work. After arguing that most existing theories...

Gravity-based cross-sectional evidence indicates that currency unions stimulate trade; cross-sectional evidence indicates that trade stimulates output. This paper estimates the effect that currency union has, via trade, on output per capita. We use economic and geographic data for over 200...

When learning-by-doing is at the origin of growth, we show that growth rates should be negatively related to the amplitude of the business cycle if the growth rate in human capital is increasing and concave in the cyclical component of production. Empirical evidence strongly supports this...

A large literature has emerged focusing on the post-entry performance of firms and, in particular, on the links between firm growth, survival, size and age. While these studies have resulted in findings that are sufficiently consistent as to constitute stylized facts, virtually all of these...

This paper contains a brief survey of recent empirical work on the performance of large companies. It tries to pull together the literature in the form of six stylized facts, illustrating them with data drawn from a single sample. The paper concludes by highlighting the issues which are thrown...

This paper focuses on one possible explanation for the empirical evidence of: (a) income convergence among the world’s poorest countries and among its wealthiest countries; and (b) income divergence among most of the remaining countries. The model incorporates the assumption of subsistence...

This paper aims to disentangle the correlation between LDC debt and growth in the 1980s. We show that large debt was not an unconditional predictor of slow growth in the eighties and that investment was not abnormally low, when compared with a `financial autarky' rate, calculated in the text. We...