This research explores the effects of culture on technological diffusion and economic development. It shows that culture's direct effects on development and barrier effects to technological diffusion are, in general, observationally equivalent. In particular, using a large set of measures of...

The present paper shows empirically that the youth dependency ratio (the population below working age divided by the population of working age) reduces economic growth even after controlling for institutions. The institutional variable, the paper controls for, is the measure for institutions...

We investigate country heterogeneity in cross-country growth regressions. In contrast to the previous literature that focuses on low-income countries, this study also highlights growth determinants in high-income (OECD) Model Averaging (IBMA) to address not only potential parameter...

We provide an overview of recent empirical research on patterns of cross-country growth. The new empirical regularities considered differ from earlier ones, e.g., the well known Kaldor stylized facts. The new research no longer makes production function accounting a central part of the analysis....

This paper investigates the nonlinear relationship between tourism and economic growth using a balanced sample of 58 countries in three continental samples (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) for the 2003–2017 period. First, we document an asymmetric threshold effect of tourism on economic...

One of the key determinants of potential growth are productivity gains. Total factor productivity (TFP) differences are the main determinant of per capita income differences between countries. A key factor to understand TFP is misallocation: the aggregate productivity loss from microeconomic...

We reassess convergence of income and its determinants across countries using the dataset constructed by Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare (2005) and our updated version of the same data. Consistent with the literature, the ergodic distribution of output per worker features separate convergence clubs....

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of empirical cross-country growth literature. The paper begins with describing the basic framework used in recent empirical cross-country growth research. Even though this literature was mainly inspired by endogenous growth theories, the...

This paper sheds light on two problems in the Penn World Table (PWT) GDP estimates. First, we show that these estimates vary substantially across different versions of the PWT despite being derived from very similar underlying data and using almost identical methodologies; that this variability...

The number of variables related to long-run economic growth is large compared with the number of countries. Bayesian model averaging is often used to impose parsimony in the cross-country growth regression. The underlying prior is that many of the considered variables need to be excluded from...