We provide an overview of recent empirical research on patterns of cross-country growth. The new empirical regularities considered differ from earlier ones, e.g., the well known Kaldor stylized facts. The new research no longer makes production function accounting a central part of the analysis....

This paper develops an approach to intergenerational mobility in which the trajectories of parental incomes during childhood and adolescence are the conditioning objects for characterizing dependence across generations. We use functional regression methods to produce an intergenerational...

This paper investigates the strength of empirical evidence for various growth theories when there is model uncertainty with respect to the correct growth model. Using model averaging methods, we find little evidence that so-called fundamental growth theories play an important role in explaining...

Barro and McCleary (2003) is a key research contribution in the new literature exploring the macroeconomic effects of religious beliefs. This paper represents an effort to evaluate the strength of their claims. We evaluate their results in terms of replicability and robustness. Overall, their...

We survey the recent literature on growth empirics in this paper. Modern growth economics has led to a rich and wide-ranging empirical literature replete with many new methodologies and many new findings. Yet in comparing the modern empirical literature to the traditional growth accounting...

This paper presents a framework for understanding the limits that exist in optimal policy design in dynamic contexts. We consider the design of policies in the context of dynamic linear models. Fundamental design limits exist for policy rules in such environments in the sense that any policy...

Under rather general conditions, observed covariances place a useful lower bound on the variance of the misspecification or noise III models based on expectations. Such models are widely used for securities prices, exchange rates, consumption, and output. For a correctly specified model, the...

Immigrants in economies with a dominant native language exhibit substantial heterogeneities in language acquisition of the majority language. We model partial equilibrium language acquisition as an equilibrium phenomenon. We consider an environment where heterogeneous agents from various...

This chapter surveys research on social capital. We explore the concepts that motivate the social capital literature, efforts to formally model social capital using economic theory, the econometrics of social capital, and empirical studies of the role of social capital in various socioeconomic...