The effect of mortality reductions on fertility is one of the main mech- anisms stressed by the recent growth literature in order to explain demo- graphic transitions. We analyze the empirical relevance of this mechanism based on the experience of all countries since 1960. We distinguish be-...

This paper studies the apparent inconsistency between the evolution of GDP per capita and real wages in pre-industrial Europe. We show that these two measures will diverge when any of the three following factors are present: changes in income distribution, changes in labour supply per capita and...

This paper presents a model where opening the capital account of an economy causes more bankruptcies to take place in the non tradables sector. Non tradable arms must forecast the future state of the economy when investing since the demand for their goods depends on this. In our model the...

We analyze how individual happiness is affected by nine major life events using a panel of British individuals. Our aim is to test the importance of hedonic adaptation in the United Kingdom and to compare our results with equivalent ones obtained in the literature using German data. We also...

In this paper we search for empirical support for the thesis that institutions are a major driver of economic development. While most of the literature uses cross-country regressions (and thus limits itself to the between-country variation in the data), this paper uses pooled OLS, panel...

This paper argues that corruption in developing countries has deep historical roots; going all the way back to the characteristics of their colonial experience. The degree of European settlement during colonial times is used to di¤erentiate between types of colonial experience, and is found to...

We study the importance of the local elite as a determinant of the effectiveness of foreign aid in developing countries. The local elite serves as an intermediary between aid donors and aid recipients through its control of the government and major firms. The likelihood of misusing aid is large...

Two mechanisms have attracted considerable attention from researchers studying the effects of income on happiness: adaptation and social comparison. In most empirical studies these two mechanisms have been considered separately. This paper contributes to the literature by jointly testing for the...