In his seminal publications between the 1930s and 1960s, Frederick Lane offered three hypotheses regarding the impact of the Voyages of Discovery that have guided debate ever since. First, pepper and other spice prices did not rise in European markets in the century before the 1490s, and thus...

This paper studies the distributional impact of commodity price shocks over both the short and very long run. Using a GARCH model, we find that Australia experienced more volatility than many commodity exporting developing countries over the periods 1865-1940 and 1960-2007. A single equation...

This paper revisits demographic dividend issues after almost 2 decades of debate. In 1998, David Bloom and I used a convergence model to estimate the impact of demographic-transition-driven age structure effects and calculated what the literature has come to call the “demographic dividend.”...

This paper documents industrial output growth around the poor periphery (Latin America, the European periphery, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa) between 1870 and 2007. We provide answers to the following questions: When and where did rapid industrial growth begin...