In medieval times, most people identified with religious values and aggregate income and productivity grew at glacier speed. In the 20th century, religion played a much lesser role in daily life and income and productivity grew at high and unprecedented rates. The present paper develops a simple...

This paper proposes tests for pairwise and multiple out-of-sample comparisons of parametric conditional quantile models. The tests rank the distance between actual and nominal conditional coverage w.r.t. the \textit{union} of information sets across models, for a given loss function. Our...

We study the general equilibrium properties of two growth models with overlapping generations, habit formation and endogenous fertility. In the neoclassical model, habits modify the economy's growth rate and generate transitional dynamics in fertility; station- ary income per capita is...

This paper analyzes the structural change implications of consumer credit expansions in a dual-sector open economy growth model. Policy-induced increases in banks' willingness and ability to lend result in new consumer lending, boosting consumption demand and average wages in the nontradable...

This paper studies the interplay between left-handedness and economic development. To explain the decline and subsequent recovery of left-handedness observed over the last few centuries in the Western world, we propose a theory in which economic development influences the prevalence of...

Financialisation, i.e., the process by which financial markets and their participants gain more influence over the functioning of enterprises/companies and the framework of the financial system, changes the functioning of the economic system, both at the macro- and microeconomic level. There is...

This paper integrates in a unified and tractable framework some of the key insights of the field of international trade and economic growth. It examines a sequence of theoretical models that share a common description of technology and preferences but differ on their assumptions about trade...

This paper examines the sources of economic growth in Algeria, studying the key drivers of their slow and weak economic performance, during the period of 1979-2019 from the perspective of the augmented growth accounting framework and the growth regression method. More specifically, the paper...

This study provides a unified growth theory to correctly predict the initially negative and subsequently positive relationship between child mortality and net reproduction observed in industrialized countries over the course of their demographic transitions. The model captures the intricate...