Beyond private ownership of the means of production, what is the most important, or essential, fact of capitalism? Friedrich A. Hayek thought it was the economy of knowledge with which the system operated, whereas for Joseph A. Schumpeter it was the process of creative destruction. To our...

We explore the relationship between government size and economic growth in an endogenous growth model with human capital and an unproductive capital which facilitates rent-seeking. With exogenous as well as endogenous time discounting, we find a non-monotonic relationship between the size of...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...

In this paper, I document three stylized facts on leaders, institutions, and re-election incentives, using cross-country data: (1) in democracies, the positive relationship between leaders' performance and their capability is significantly less pronounced in their last term, when they do not...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...