Literature on convergence among Latin American countries is still scarce compared to other regions. Moreover, almost none of the research connects convergence to the economic history of Latin America and the usual finding is one speed of convergence. In this paper I analyze 32 countries and 108...

Public regulations can increase economic growth by correcting market faults and decrease growth by consuming resources and reducing incentives. A simple theoretical framework is developed to represent commonly held views on the relationship between growth an regulation. The relationship is...

The common perception in the literature, mainly based on U.S. data, is that current dividend yields are uninformative about future dividends. We show that this finding changes substantially when looking at a broad international panel of countries, as aggregate dividend growth rates are found to...

The recent literature on the aid-growth relation discusses two competing models: The Good Policy Model, where the key feature is policy times aid, and the Medicine Model, where the key feature is aid squared. Both have been reached on a sample of about 1/3 of the available data. We present a...

The AEL consists of empirical macro studies of the effects of development aid. At the end of 2004 it had reached 97 studies of three families, which we have summarized in one study each using meta-analysis. Studies of the effect on investments show that they rise by 1/3 of the aid – the rest...

The empirical literature explaining the driving forces behind the flows of development aid consists of (at least) 166 studies. One factor that has been analyzed in 30 of these studies is growth in the recipient country. A priori the effect may as well be positive as negative. This is an...

Aid flows are included into the standard cross-country catch-up relation. Robust¬ness of the result is tested by changing time periods and by adding extra variables. The main results are: Absolute conver¬gence and absolute aid effec¬ti¬ve¬ness are both rejected. While conditional...