A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in levels of per capita income and product? After considering predictions of closed- and open-economy neoclassical growth theories, we...

The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970-2006. We show that: (1) African...

The role of social safety nets in the form of redistributional transfers and wage subsidies is analyzed using a simple model of criminal behavior. It is argued that public welfare programs act as a crime--preventing or disruption--preventing devices because they tend to increase the opportunity...

In this paper we argue that the relevant decision for the majority of US households is not the fraction of assets to be held in interest bearing form, but whether to hold any of such assets at all (we call this `the decision to adopt' the financial technology). We show that the key variable...

This is a survey of the literature on Economic Growth. In the introduction we analyze the main differences between exogenous and endogenous growth models using fixed savings rate analysis. We argue that in order to have endogenous growth there must be constant returns to the factors that can be...

166 countries have some kind of public old age pension. What economic forces create and sustain old age Social Security as a public program? We document some of the internationally and historically common features of Social Security programs including explicit and implicit taxes on labor supply,...

We construct a model that combines elements of endogenous growth with the convergence implications of the neoclassical growth model. In the long run, the world growth rate is driven by discoveries in the technologically leading economies Followers converge toward the leaders because copying is...

We propose a positive theory that is consistent with two important features of social security programs around the world: (1) they redistribute income from young to old and (2) they induce retirement. We construct a voting model that includes a political campaign' or debate' prior to the...

Technological progress takes the form of improvements in quality of an array of intermediate inputs to production. In an equilibrium that is standard in the literature, all research is carried out by outsiders, and success means that the outsider replaces the incumbent as the industry leader....