Following the collapse of the bubble economy in Japan, banking supervisors and bank examiners were severely criticized by the media as human capital had long been viewed the key element of Japanese banking supervision. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the bank supervisors ́career paths...

I examine the activity of political elites during a period of intensive state-building in pre-imperial China. Using a novel hand-collected dataset on 1,075 political elites, I find that civil unrest was responsible for a majority of the deaths of elites, that there was substitution away from...

Imperial China used an empire-wide system of examinations to select civil servants. Using a semiparametric matching-based difference-in-differences estimator, we show that the persecution of scholar-officials led to a decline in the number of examinees at the provincial and prefectural level. To...

After investigating the effect of external financial flows on total factor productivity and technological gain, we use the beta catch-up and sigma convergence to compare dispersions in output per worker, total factor productivity and technological gain in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) for the years...

One of the most interesting facts about the growth of developed nations, especially of the US growth, in the last three decades is significant growth of the ratio of the wage of skilled labor to that of unskilled labor. At the same time, existing evidence seems to suggest that the ratio of the...

Do high levels of human capital foster economic growth by facilitating technology adoption? If so, countries with more human capital should have adopted more rapidly the skilled-labor augmenting technologies becoming available since the 1970’s. High human capital levels should therefore have...

In this article, we survey the theoretical literature investigating the role of gender inequality in economic development. The vast majority of theories reviewed suggest that gender inequality is a barrier to development, particularly over the long run. Among the many plausible mechanisms...

The paper analyzes the comparative effects of alternative health financing mechanisms on economic growth within a two-sector model with human capital. The transitional growth effects of a social insurance system are stronger than those of an out-of-pocket payment system. A private health...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse if the divergences in the economic growth of the Spanish regions are a result of sectoral differences, company size or technological level of the new firms that emerge in the market. Design/methodology/approach For this purpose, a model is...

Population ageing constitutes a central challenge to Finland. Understanding the Finnish economy's likely future trajectory and the key sources of growth is important for the design of policies to counteract these adverse long-term trends. For this purpose, we develop a novel long-run forecast...