This article considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from being a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process, most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system, as measured by the...

Economists emphasize the welfare gains of unrestricted trade, but politicians worry about the income distribution effects of increased competition. We show that the welfare gains of a trade shock become ambiguous if inaccurate information hinders optimal income redistribution with distortionary...

The empirical relation between happiness and religiosity is considered from the perspective of basic utility theory. An unbalanced cross-country panel data set is used to study whether religiosity can be considered as a substitute in the happiness function, which itself is held to be a proxy for...

A simple general equilibrium model is borrowed from economics to study alternative foreign policy strategies of regional powers that are conditional on external constraints. An equilibrium hegemonic strategy is modeled as the joint production and consumption of two “goods” (empire and...

We use the largest common factor in 14 items reported in the World Values Surveys as a robust measure of religiosity. This measure is held to identify the importance of religion in all aspects of people's life. The level of religiosity differs by about 50 percentage points between rich and poor...

The agricultural transition, the demographic transition and the democratic transition explain the development paths of the share of agriculture, the population growth rate, and the standard democracy indices. We demonstrate that two related estimation models give contradictory results when...

We show that the specification of technology differences in recent empirical studies of trade is not supported by basic growth theory and may lead to biased estimates of the pattern of specialization and trade.

Die entwicklungspolitische Debatte hat lange darunter gelitten, daß ihr eine überzeugende theoretische Grundlage fehlte. Dies beginnt sich seit einigen Jahren mit dem Aufkommen der "neuen" Wachstumstheorie zu ändern. Deren Implikationen stützen das, was neoklassisch orientierte...

Most empirical studies of long run growth refer to one of the two seminal contributions by Robert Solow (1956, 1957). His work shows that in order to estimate the relative roles of factor accumulation and technology in development, an a priori identification assumption is needed about the nature...