Even before the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis and ongoing European debt crisis, much attention has been given to the re-emergence of the Asian giants, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and India. Both countries have attained unprecedented growth and economic development — PRC...

Does economic growth create democracy, as suggested by the proposition known as the Lipset hypothesis? According to this paper, for the Lipset hypothesis to be valid, it is sufficient for an ideological and a technological condition to be fulfilled. The ideological condition is that the...

This paper investigates the effects of inflation on per capita income growth for 36 developed and developing countries by using structural vector autoregression models that are robust to the consideration of endogeneity by construction. The results show evidence for heterogeneity of such effects...

In this period of high uncertainty about future economic growth, we have developed a growth projection tool for 13 advanced countries and the euro area at the 2100 horizon. This high uncertainty is reflected in the debate on the possibility of a ‘secular stagnation', fuelled by the short-lived...

Does financial development enable growth in developing countries? We find evidence for this in sub-Saharan Africa, a region where there is an urgent need to promote growth. Using a modern time series methodology and data for 22 countries over the period from 1960 to 2009, we find unidirectional...

This paper develops a model of the relationship between the age of a dictator and economic growth. In the model a dictator must spread the resources of the economy over his reign but faces mortality and political risk. The model shows that if the time horizon of the dictator decreases, either...

This paper formally proves that economic outcomes are not independent from the corporate governance system and its ability to protect shareholders’ rights. This is achieved by extending a neoclassical growth model to incorporate an imperfectly functioning market for managerial labour enabling...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion,...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major...

This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions, and economic development. It discusses the various measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms that explain the influence of trust on economic performance...