type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>During industrialization, Protestants were more literate than Catholics. This paper investigates whether this fact may be led back to the intrinsic motivation of Protestants to read the bible and to what extent other education motives might have been involved as well....</p>

U.S. data reveal three facts: (1) the share of goods in total expenditure declines at a constant rate over time, (2) the price of goods relative to services declines at a constant rate over time, and (3) poor households spend a larger fraction of their budget on goods than do rich households. I...

This paper examines the role of religious denomination for human capital formation. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of...

Growth is associated with (i) shifts in the sectoral structure of the economy, (ii) changes in relative prices and (iii) the Kaldor facts. Moreover, (iv) cross-sectional data shows systematic differences in the expenditure structure across income groups. This paper presents a growth model which...

Taking a look at sectoral macroeconomic data, this paper motivates the importance of (i) structural change, (ii) biased technical change and (iii) non-homotheticity of preferences. We provide a tractable theory of directed technical change where households have non-homothetic preferences and...