Economic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries, following the Industrial Revolutions, was much faster than in preceding centuries. This unprecedented global growth coincided with the global proliferation of democracy, with some evidence for bidirectional causation. Macroeconomic forecasts have...

The institutional foundation of economic growth extends beyond institutions that limit the grabbing hand of the state and effectively enforce contracts. Growth predicates on social institutions that foster the development and use of productivity-enhancing knowledge. In particular,...

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

The fundamental, underlying factors of development are often neglected when analyzing the question why countries experience a growth slowdown at the middle-income range. Although these so-called `deep determinants' such as geography and institutions have been found to be decisive for the break...

Conventional wisdom about the relationship between income distribution and economicdevelopment has been subjected to dramatic transformations in the past century. Whileclassical economists advanced the hypothesis that inequality is beneficial for growth, theneoclassical paradigm dismissed the...