We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between "entrepreneurs" and other business owners. We show that the incorporated self-employed and their businesses engage in activities that demand comparatively strong nonroutine cognitive abilities, while...

This paper describes a simple model of technology adoption which combines the two engines of growth emphasized in the recent growth literature: human capital accumulation and technological progress. Our model economy does not create new technologies, it simply adopts those that have been created...

A vast literature uses cross-country regressions to search for empirical linkages between long-run growth rates and a variety of economic policy, political, and institutional indicators. This paper examines whether the conclusions from existing studies are robust or fragile to small changes in...

The authors present cross-country evidence consistent with Joseph Schumpeter's view that the financial system can promote economic growth, using data on eighty countries over the 1960-89 period. Various measures of the level of financial development are strongly associated with real per capita...

An influential body of theoretical research and an emerging line of empirical work suggest that the operation of the formal financial system affects the degree to which economic opportunities are defined by talent and initiative rather than by parental wealth and social connections....