We analyze the joint dynamics of religious beliefs, scientific progress and coalitional politics along both religious and economic lines. History offers many examples of the recurring tensions between science and organized religion, but as part of the paper’s motivating evidence we also...

Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

This is an attempt to derive broad, strategic lessons from the diverse experience with economic growth in last 50 years. The paper revolves around two key arguments. One is that neo-classical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally...

We revisit one of the central empirical findings of the political economy literature that higher income per capita causes democracy. Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy, but do not typically control for factors that simultaneously affect...

We investigate the impact of within-country spatial concentration of economic activity on country-level growth, using cross-section OLS and dynamic panel GMM estimation. Agglomeration is measured alternatively through measures of urbanization and through indices of spatial concentration based on...

This paper integrates in a unified and tractable framework some of the key insights of the field of international trade and economic growth. It examines a sequence of theoretical models that share a common description of technology and preferences but differ on their assumptions about trade...

The "Easterlin paradox" suggests that there is no link between a society’s economic development and its average level of happiness. We re-assess this paradox analyzing multiple rich datasets spanning many decades. Using recent data on a broader array of countries, we establish a clear positive...

What is the relationship between economic growth and its volatility? Does political instability affect growth directly or indirectly, through volatility? This paper tries to answer such questions using a power-ARCH framework with annual time series data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. We show...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions 'trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

This paper presents a framework to understand and measure the effects of political borders on economic growth and per capita income levels. In our model, political integration between two countries results in a positive country size effect and a negative effect through reduced openness...