Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their empirical approach must produce insignificant...

The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the...

Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the...

Regional output per worker has converged in China in the era of market socialism since 1978. The estimated speed of convergence is about 2 percent. This speed of convergence can be explained by an open economy neoclassical growth model in the tradition of Robert Solow. My empirical results show...

Despite large rate of return differentials implied by persistent income differentials, relatively little capital flows to poor countries. The rate of return differentials are substantially reduced, however, if different human capital endowments are taken into account, as is shown for a limited...

Openness appears to have a strong impact on economic growth especially in DCs, which typically exhibit a high share of physical capital in factor income and a low share of labor. In the neoclassical growth model with partial capital mobility, physical capital's share in factor income determines...

Globalization improves the prospects for developing countries (DCs) to catch up economically with industrialized countries. Depending on economic policies with respect to openness and factor accumulation, globalization may increase capital and technology flows to DCs, thereby generating a higher...

Recent advances in the theory of economic growth have led to a large number of competing endogenous-growth models. The empirical evidence presented in this paper supports the Rebelo (1991) growth model with constant returns to scale and constant returns to aggregate capital. For reasonable...