This paper builds a multi-sector, three country (centre and two peripheries), New Economic Geography model, where industrial sectors differ in the degree of scale economies and skill-intensity. The model incorporates, for the first time in this class of models, payments to the unemployed in each...

We examine the impact that financial development had on earnings inequality in Brazil in the 1980’s and 90’s. The empirical evidence, based on panel time series and time series data, shows that more broad access to financial and credit markets had a significant and robust effect in reducing...

Why did England industrialize first? And why was Europe ahead of the rest of the world? Unified growth theory in the tradition of Galor-Weil (2000) and Galor-Moav (2002) captures the key features of the transition from stagnation to growth over time. Yet we know remarkably little about why...

This research advances an evolutionary growth theory that captures the pattern of life expectancy in the process of development, shedding new light on the sources of the remarkable rise in life expectancy since the Agricultural Revolution. The theory suggests that social, economic and...

This paper studies the effects of taxation on long-run growth in a two-sector endogenous growth model with (i) physical capital as an input in the education sector and (ii) leisure as an additional argument in the utility function. Due to the flexibility of labor supply, taxation of income may...

During the past few years, empirical economic growth modeling has emerged by constructing and testing numerous model and explanatory variable alternatives. One of the most promising recent idea consists that also religious aspects should be included as explanatory variables into economic growth...

How do the liquidity functions of banks affect investment and growth at different stages of economic development? How do financial fragility and the costs of banking crises evolve with the level of wealth of countries? We analyze these issues using an overlapping generations growth model where...

We investigate the Ramsey-like dynamics of nonrenewable resource abundance on economic growth and welfare in a two country world. One country is endowed with a non-renewable- resource Otherwise, countries are identical. The one country result of Rodríguez and Sachs (1999) that the initial stock...

The present work encloses an analysis related to the channels through which income inequality affects economic growth and another related to the sources of economic growth. In the first, we use two-stage estimation with fixed effects finding that the fiscal effects of inequality on growth may...