We construct a competitive model of innovation and growth under constant returns to scale. Previous models of growth under constant returns cannot model technological innovation. Current models of endogenous innovation rely on the interplay between increasing returns and monopolistic markets. In...

This Paper studies empirically the effects of and the interactions amongst economic and political liberalizations. Economic liberalizations are measured by a widely used indicator that captures the scope of the market in the economy, and in particular of policies towards freer international...

Economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries. Four main channels of transmission from abundant natural resources to stunted economic development are discussed: (a) the Dutch disease, (b) rent seeking, (c) overconfidence,...

We demonstrate that there is a nexus between land transfers and human capital formation. A sequence of land redistributions enables the beneficiaries to educate their children and thus to escape from poverty and to overcome child labour. We find that open access to land markets should be...

Development and convergence is explained as the transfer of technology embodied in machinery, to the manufacturing sector of those developing countries that institute the necessary property rights. The process is modelled within a Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson framework with capital mobility and...

This paper studies the incidence of civil war over time. We put forward a canonical model of civil war, which relates the incidence of conflict to circumstances, institutions and features of the underlying economy and polity. We use this model to derive testable predictions and to interpret the...

A popular "stylized fact" is that poverty is a main determinant of civil war: several scholars have interpreted the correlation between the two as evidence supporting this claim. In this paper, we find that the relationship between poverty and civil war is spurious, and is accounted for by...

En este artículo se estudia el comportamiento de la tasa de crecimiento del PIB colombiano entre 1982-2008 a partir de un modelo SETAR (Self-Exciting Threshold Autoregressive), empleando la metodología propuesta por Tsay (1989) y Tong (1990) para la detección de no linealidades relacionadas...

Candidate countries for accession to the EU often view EU convergence criteria as difficult given that the period of faster growth that real convergence necessitates is usually associated with higher inflation. This paper argues that it is important to focus on the mechanism of real convergence...

Hausmann, Pritchett, and Rodrik (2005) found that a political regime change increases the probability of an economic growth acceleration. When we tried to replicate their results we discovered that these authors were led astray by a datadescription error in the Polity IV manual. When we correct...