Empirical evidence shows that not all countries with high levels of corruption have su¤ered poor growth performance. Bad quality governance has clearly been much less damaging (if at all) in some economies than in others. Why this is so is a question that has largely been ignored, and the...

Economic and demographic outcomes are determined jointly in a choice-theoretic model of fertility, mortality and capital accumulation. There is an endogenous population of reproductive agents who belong to dynastic families of overlapping generations connected through altruism. In addition to...

Exponential smoothing can introduce spurious auto-correlation in detrended data. The extent of this depends on the length of lag, the value of the smoothing parameter and the nature of the input process. The most widely-used version of exponential smoothing is the Hodrick-Prescott low-frequency...

We present an overlapping generations model in which aspirationalagents face uncertainty about the returns to human capital. Investment in human capital requires external funding, implying a probability of bankruptcy that is greater the lower the human capital endowment of an agent. We show that...