The literature overwhelmingly supports the proposition that high-quality domestic institutions are a precondition for economic growth. Political freedoms have been shown to contribute to this institutional quality. A smaller literature suggests that the adoption and enforcement of core labor...

Three important features of the U.S. economy during the neoliberal era since the mid-1970s have been: (a) growing financialization, (b) increasing household debt, and (c) stagnant real wages for production and non-supervisory workers. This paper develops a discrete-time Marxian circuit of...

This paper investigates the relevance of the No-Ponzi game condition for public debt (i.e. the public debt growth rate has to be lower than the real interest rate) and the transversality condition for the GDP growth rate (i.e. the GDP growth rate has to be lower than the real interest rate)....

What are the factors that make for a decent work environment and how do the conditions of work vary in different parts of the United States? To address these and similarly important questions in a clear and accessible way, we have developed a new approach for measuring the work environment on a...

An unresolved debate in the development literature concerns the impact of gender inequality on economic growth. Previous studies have found that the effect depends on the time frame (short or long run) and the measure of inequality. This paper expands that discussion by considering both the...

This paper estimates the effects of external constraints on growth and investment in the Mexican economy, and how those effects have changed since the economic liberalization of the 1980s and the formation of NAFTA in 1994. Shocks to net financial inflows, world oil prices, the U.S. growth rate,...

This paper presents new non-linear regression estimates of the relationship between inflation and economic growth for 80 countries over the period 1961 – 2000. We perform tests using the full sample of countries as well as sub-samples consisting of OECD countries, middle-income countries, and...

The vast majority of Americans work for a living. The track record of different states varies widely when it comes to providing decent opportunities for working people. The Work Environment Index (WEI) captures these differences and provides a basis for evaluating how well each state does in...