Using cross-country differences in the degree of isolation before the advent of technologies in sea and air transportation, we assess the relationship between geographic isolation and financial development across the globe. We find that pre-historic geographical isolation has been beneficial to...

Not only do Africa's fragile states grow more slowly than non-fragile states, but they seem to be caught in a"fragility trap". For instance, the probability that a fragile state in 2001 was still fragile in 2009 was 0.95. This paper presents an economic model where three features -- political...

The paper investigates the sources of growth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1960 and evaluates the relative importance of total factor productivity growth and factor accumulation, using a cointegration method and a growth accounting framework. The main findings confirm that poor...

Between the latter nineteenth century and the 1930s there was a dramatic revolution in American families. Family size continued its long-term decline, the schooling of older children expanded and the proportion of married females' adulthood devoted to market-oriented activities increased. Over...

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s-1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7 to 50 percent; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented...

While much research in economic development has pointed out the negative impact of corruption on growth, less research has been devoted to studying the relationship between corruption and demographic transition. This theme is developed into an overlapping generation model in which corruption...

This paper suggests a cause of low density in urban development or urban sprawl that has not been given much attention in the literature. There have been a number of arguments put forward for market failures that may account for urban sprawl, including incomplete pricing of infrastructure,...