Coordination games have become a critical tool of analysis in fields such as development and institutional economics. Understanding behavior in coordination games is an important step towards understanding the differing success of teams, firms and nations. This paper investigates the...

Social science research has shown that intelligence is positively correlated with patience, while growth theory predicts that more patient countries will save more. In a closed economy, that means high average IQ countries will become more capital-intensive. In an open economy, high average IQ...

Cognitive skills are robustly associated with good national economic performance. How much of this is due to high-skill countries doing a better job of absorbing total factor productivity from the world's technology leader? Following Benhabib and Spiegel (Handbook of Economic Growth, 2005), who...

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on...

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on...

National measures of cognitive skill, including IQ tests, have received attention recently as a possible driver of cross-country productivity differences. In a parallel literature, national measures of entrepreneurial activity and pro-entrepreneurship policies have received similar attention....

Since 2008, support for effective fiscal stimulus has been premised on the belief in the existence of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of what became popularly known as ― shovel-ready projects. These infrastructure construction and improvement projects would simultaneously lower...

There is renewed interest in a significant economic stimulus package to build and improve public works infrastructure. The experience of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) suggests that marrying the goals of infrastructure provision and putting unemployed individuals back to...

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...