Recent studies have claimed that states with initiatives systems of legislation use this more direct from of democracy to improve productive resource allocation. This paper compares the economic performance of states with initiatives to states that do not have initiatives. We first construct a...

The ratio of Indian to US per capita output over the past 45 years has displayed a distinctive V-shaped pattern. We show that a strikingly similar V-shaped pattern is visible not just in aggregate output .figures, but also as the primary determinant of long-term movements in the cross-sectional...

We investigate the controversial issue whether unemployment is related to productivity growth in the long run, using U.S. data in a framework of infrequent mean shifts. Tests find (endogenously dated) shifts around 1974, 1986, and 1996, system techniques indicate that the shifts are common...

It has been shown that higher capital taxes can have a growth-enhancing effect when combined with a revenue-compensating cut in wage taxes (Uhlig and Yanagawa 1996; European Economic Review 40, 1521-1540) or with an expansion in productivity-increasing public services (Rivas 2003; European Economic...

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the substitutions between market and home production and on the structural transformation between agriculture, manufacturing and...

In this paper we develop a new empirical approach to uncovering the impact of social attitudes on economic development. We first show that trust of second-generation Americans is significantly influenced by the country of origin of their forebears. In the spirit of the epidemiology literature,...