This paper revisits demographic dividend issues after almost 2 decades of debate. In 1998, David Bloom and I used a convergence model to estimate the impact of demographic-transition-driven age structure effects and calculated what the literature has come to call the “demographic dividend.”...

This paper revisits demographic dividend issues after almost two decades of debate. In 1998, David Bloom and Jeffrey Williamson used a convergence model to estimate the impact of demographic-transition-driven age structure effects and calculated what the literature has come to call the...

In the last years, the work by Engerman and Sokoloff (ES) on the divergent development paths within the Americas has provided an important backing to the institutionalist school. In line with the work by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, ES assume the existence of institutional persistence: once...

This paper aims first of all to explore the social sustainability and the quality of economic growth in a sample of 50 Emerging and Transition Economies (ETEs), which are countries experiencing a process of fast growth and institutional change in most cases. Through a series of cross-country...

The story of South Asia is a topsy-turvy one. Soon after independence from British rule, the region seemed to have a much better prospect than many other parts of the Third World; the prospects soon dimmed, however, as South Asia crawled while East and Southeast Asia galloped away. But a large...

The story of South Asia is a topsy-turvy one. Soon after independence from British rule, the region seemed to have a much better prospect than many other parts of the Third World; the prospects soon dimmed, however, as South Asia crawled while East and Southeast Asia galloped away. But a large...

We present a model of growth and distributional conflict that implies a non-monotonic relationship between average wealth and the likelihood of radical redistribution: while the net benefits of redistribution for members of the poor class are small at low stages of development, a shift towards...

If people understand that some macroeconomic policies are unsustainable, why would they vote for them in the first place? We develop a political economy theory of the endogenous emergence of fiscal crises, based on the idea that the adjustment mechanism to a crisis favors some social groups,...

We investigate the long term determinants of political and economic outcomes over a new data set composed of Mississippi counties. We analyze the effect of disfranchisement on voting registration at the end of the nineteenth century (1896-9), as well as the impact of voting registration on...

We present a model of growth and distributional conflict that implies a non-monotonic relationship between average wealth and the likelihood of radical redistribution: while the net benefits of redistribution for members of the poor class are small at low stages of development, a shift towards...