This essay reviews the relationship between natural-resource abundance and economic growth around the world, and presents some new results. The principal reasons why resource-based production can inhibit economic growth over long periods are traced to the Dutch disease, neglect of education,...

This paper empirically investigates the extent to which technological characteristics in exports affect the patterns of trade-led economic growth across countries. Data of the Balassa index, which captures a country's revealed comparative advantage, are obtained for industries classified by...

Rent extraction by capitalists is present if the capital income share exceeds the capital output elasticity. Based on a sample of 111 countries during the period 1970-2010, this paper provides estimates of the capital output elasticity and compares these to countries' capital income shares....

This essay reviews the relationship between natural-resource abundance and economic growth around the world, and presents some new results. The principal reasons why resource-based production can inhibit economic growth over long periods are traced to the Dutch disease, neglect of education,...

According to Acemoglu, Robinson and Johnson (2002), institutional divergence prior to the Industrial Revolution is the fundamental cause of differences in income levels across countries. To quantify the impact of institutions on long-run growth rates that drive the differences in levels, we...

There is increasing empirical evidence that creative destruction, driven by experimentation and the adoption of new products and processes when investment is sunk, is a core mechanism of development. Obstacles to this process are likely to be obstacles to the progress in standards of living....

The relationship between economic growth and the environment is, and will always remain, controversial. Some see the emergence of new pollution problems, the lack of success in dealing with global warming and the still rising population in the Third World as proof positive that humans are a...

Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...

We analyze the distribution of economic activity across space for different types of activity and different levels of aggregation. Not only is this distribution highly uneven (independently of the type of activity and level of aggregation), it is also remarkably regular regarding its size...

This paper documents the influence of diaspora networks of high-skilled individuals - i.e., inventors - on international technological collaborations. By means of gravity models, it studies the determinants of the internationalization of inventive activity between a group of industrialized...