This paper offers a thesis for why the US overtook the UK and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per capita GDP as a case study of recent models of endogenous growth, where "human capital" is the engine of growth. By human capital we mean an intangible asset, best...

Mercantilist theories and policies in early capitalism have been criticized for confusing microeconomic and macroeconomic sources of wealth, for misunderstanding the benefits of free trade, and for overrating the role of money. This paper aims to reconstruct the rationality of mercantilism as an...

We investigate how bank migration across state lines over the last quarter century has affected the size and covariance of business fluctuations within states. Starting with a two-state version of the unit banking model in Holmstrom and Triocole (1997), we conclude that the theoretical effect of...

A general growth model with explicit resource reallocation costs is set up. A new feature is the property of hysteresis (i.e. a continuum of stationary equilibria) in closed-economy growth models. Employing a linear model the hysteresis range and the consequences for the long-run growth rate are...

To detect the quantity theory of money, we follow Lucas (1980) by looking at scatter plots of filtered time series of inflation and money growth rates and interest rates and money growth rates. Like Whiteman (1984), we relate those scatter plots to sums of two-sided distributed lag coefficients...

Recent World Bank reports indicate that the world has seen a severe reduction in poverty, representing not just a cutback in the relative incidence of poverty but a significant decline in the total number of poorʺ people. However in Latin America, the incidence of poverty has remained...

Progress in achieving institutional changes should be evaluated through the prism of their influence on the development abilities of the relevant country. In Poland, during 20 years of comprehensive systemic shift, GDP increased more than in any other postsocialist country. To judge the...

Several economic data series of Liechtenstein are backwardly estimated in order to achieve consistent historic time series. The generated series consist for instance of the national income for the years 1954 to 1992 (by regressive inter- and retropolation with indicators) and 1993 to 1997 (by...

The Eurozone crisis mobilises an appreciable amount of the attention of politicians and the public, with calls for a decisive defence of the euro, because the single currency's demise is said to be the beginning of the end of the EU and Single European Market. In our view, preserving the euro...

This article views the four economies of the South in a long run historical perspective of 1500-2000. It contrasts the history and the initial endowments of the two Northern hemisphere economies China and India which are land scarce and labour abundant with the two Southern hemisphere economies...