We formulate a model to explain why the lack of political competition may stifle economic performance and use the United States as a testing ground for the model’s predictions, exploiting the 1965 Voting Rights Act which helped break the near monpoly on political power of the Democrats in...

Insufficiently flexible labour markets combined with high welfare costs are often thought to be the main cause of unsatisfactory growth in Europe. This paper uses the OECD data on regulation of the product and labour market to confirm the difference in the extent of regulation between US and...

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively...

We use U.S. county-level data to estimate convergence rates for 22 individual states. We find significant heterogeneity. E.g., the California estimate is 19.9 percent and the New York estimate is 3.3 percent. Convergence rates are essentially uncorrelated with income levels. -- Economic Growth ;...

This paper presents a review of the literature on the economics of shared societies. As defined by the Club de Madrid, shared societies are societies in which people hold an equal capacity to participate in and benefit from economic, political, and social opportunities regardless of race,...

Why did the Japanese economy stagnate beforeWorldWar II, how did it achieve rapid economic growth after the war, and why did it stagnate again after the 1970s? To answer these questions, I developed a two-country trade model with technology transfer, where firms in a developed country (the U.S.)...

In several articles published in the 1990s, de Long and Summers argued that investment in producer durables had a high propensity to generate externalities in using industries, resulting in a systematic and substantial divergence between its social and private return. They maintained, moreover,...

This paper returns to the discussion of how income inequality affects economic growth. The main argument is that economic freedom is likely to affect the association although the relations are theoretically ambiguous. In a panel of 300 observations from five-year periods across the 50 US states,...

This paper attempts to examine, compare and forecast the per capita GDP of India, the USA, China, and Japan for a period of ten years from 2020 to 2029. It studies the concept of economic convergence which states that the developing economies’ per capita income levels tend to move at a faster...

Energy conversion in the production of goods and services, and the resulting emissions associated with entropy production, have not yet been taken into account by the mainstream theory of economic growth. Novel econometric analyses, however, have revealed energy as a production factor whose...