Convergence concerns poor economies catching up with rich ones. At issue is what happens to the cross sectional distribution of economies, not whether a single economy tends towards its own steady state. It is the latter, however, that has preoccupied the traditional approach to convergence...

This paper models fluctuations in regional disaggregates as a nonstationary, dynamically evolving distribution. Doing so enables study of the dynamics of aggregate fluctuations jointly with those of the rich cross-section of regional disaggregates. For the US, the leading state- regardless of...

Kelly (1992) has recently shown evidence on convergence cannot be taken as evidence against endogenous growth in general. This study uses a well-known class of stochastic growth models to show other difficulties with traditional empirical studies of convergence. Key parameters typically cannot...

This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India û two economies that account for a third of the world's population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper calibrates the impact each has on different welfare indicators and on the...

Convergence concerns the poor catching up with the rich- if not instantaneously, then at least having a tendency to do so. When poor and rich refer here refer to entire economies then whether convergence occurs is traditionally viewed as just a side consequence of a more central question, namely...

This paper reviews the cross-country record of economic growth, using as organizing framework how economic theory has guided that empirical analysis. The paper argues that recent studies of economic growth û both empirical and theoretical û distinguish from previous work in three distinct...

The convergence hypotehsis has genreated a huge empriical literature: this paper critically reviews some of the earlier key findings, clarifies their implications, and relates thme to more recent results. Particular attention is devoted to interpreting convergence empirics. The mian finding s...

Can the increasing significance of knowledge-products in national income - the growing weightless economy - influence economic development? Those technologies reduce 'distance' between consumers and knowledge production. This paper analyzes a model embodying such a reduction. The model shows how...

Many cultural products have the same nonrival nature as scientific knowledge. They therefore face identical difficulties in creation and dissemination. One traditional view says market failure is endemic: societies tolerate monopolistic inefficiency in intellectual property (IP) protection to...

This paper shows how standard methods can be used to formulate and estimate a dynamic index model for random fields - stochastic processes indexed by time and cross section where the time-series and cross section dimensions are comparable in magnitude. We use these study dynamic co-movements of...