Evidence from a broad panel of countries shows little overall relation between income inequality and rates of growth and investment. However, for growth, higher inequality tends to retard growth in poor countries and encourage growth in richer places. The Kuznets curve-whereby inequality first...

In this article, we examine the effect of the imperfect mobility of goods on international risk sharing and, through that, on the investment in risky projects, welfare and growth. We find that the welfare gain of financial market openness is not monotonic with respect to investors' risk aversion...

This paper examines the macroeconomic aftermath of the 1992 breakdown of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). The economic performance of six leaver' nations is compared with five stayer' nations that maintained a roughly fixed parity with the Deutsche Mark. Recent writing about...

We show that armed actors refrain from using their power to arbitrarily steal from an economy if, and only if, the armed actors' property rights over stealing from that economy are secure. By 2009, armed actors taxed, administered, and protected various villages in Democratic Republic of the...

The 20th century beheld a dramatic transformation of the family. Some Kuznets style facts regarding structural change in the family are presented. Over the course of the 20th century in the United States fertility declined, educational attainment waxed, housework fell, leisure increased, jobs...

Population growth has declined markedly in almost all major economies since the 1970s. We argue this trend has important consequences for the process of firm dynamics and aggregate growth. We study a rich semi-endogenous growth model of firm dynamics, and show analytically that a decline in...

While the importance of innovation to economic development is widely understood, the conditions conducive to it remain the focus of much attention. This volume offers new theoretical and empirical contributions to fundamental questions relating to the economics of innovation and technological...

"Innovation and entrepreneurship are ubiquitous today, both as fields of study and as starting points for conversations among experts in government and economic development. But while these areas on continue to attract public and private investments, many measurements of their resulting economic...

In 1960, South Korea's exports were about 1 percent of GDP, and the country's ability to import depended almost entirely on US aid. After changing its foreign exchange and trade policies in the mid-1960s, Korea saw a surge in exports to more than 10 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. What...

The nonrivalry of ideas gives rise to increasing returns, a fact celebrated in Paul Romer's recent Nobel Prize. An implication is that the long-run rate of economic growth is the product of the degree of increasing returns and the growth rate of research effort; this is the essence of...