The present paper provides an overview of literature on the shift to services. It follows the three dimensions of structural change - final demand, the inter-industry division of labor and inter-industry productivity differences. It first looks at the "classics", however (Fisher (1935), Clark...

Many studies have estimated the growth effects of globalization where globalization was measured with a few economic variables, ignoring its social and political dimensions. Recently Dreher (2006) has developed a comprehensive measure of globalization with several variables from the economic,...

The examination of U.S. crises reveals that the current financial crisis follows past patterns. An investment bubble creates excess demand for new financing instruments. During the railroad bubbles of the nineteenth century loans were issued at a pace higher than many companies could pay back....

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...

We compare the duration and performance of different monetary regimes, especially the contrast between countries those that fix exchange rates and those that target inflation. Inflation targeting is a more durable policy; no country has yet been forced to abandon an inflation target, while many...

In this paper two basic policy paradigms are distinguished: updated liberalism that is fully aware of the limits to markets and therefore aims at their active regulation, and neo-liberalism that is based on market fundamentalism and aims at privatisation, deregulation and budgetary austerity....

Does economic development depend on geographic endowments like temperate instead of tropical location, the ecological conditions shaping diseases, or an environment good for grains or certain cash crops? Or do these endowments of tropics, germs, and crops affect economic development only through...

This paper reviews the growing body of evidence on the relative economic standing of different regions of the world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In general, it does not find support for Eurocentric claims regarding Western Europe's early economic lead. The Eurocentric...

We review theoretical and empirical research on the dynamic interactions between cultures and institutions. We think about culture as a system of values and about institutions as formalized rules of the game. Our presentation is organized around a simple theoretical framework of political...

This paper is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the connections between sovereignty (or its absence) and growth rates in lagging countries over the period 1870 to 1950. Using a four-fold taxonomy of sovereignty, our estimates of sovereignty differentials for growth rates of per capita...