In this paper, we consider whether or not inequality forces society to expend more resources on supervision which imposes an extra cost to doing business. Some argue that since inequality deteriorates social capital, there is a greater need for supervisory labor which is a costly burden to bear....

This paper aims to explain differences in infant mortality across the colony of Quebec, known in the 1850s as Canada East, by institutional settings. Areas settled under French laws (known as seigneurial law) implied important transfers from peasants to landlords through private taxes and...

In this paper we revisit the methodological aspects of the issue of spurious cycles: using the well-established clinometric data, we apply an empirical strategy to identify spurious periodicities and cross-validate the results. The analysis of cyclical fluctuations involves numerous challenges,...

The goal of this paper is to apply the theory of the political Kuznets curve to Russia and reveal the key determinants of the probability of recent protests during 2011-2012 in the Russian regions. We apply the political Kuznets curve in the time and spatial dimensions, and find mixed evidence:...

Having shown the important role of the Russian economy in the ex-USSR region by causality tests, we proceed to empirical analysis of growth and performance of the Russian regions. A dynamic panel data approach enabled us to obtain elasticity coefficients on proxies for convergence, physical...

We test the history-augmented Solow model with respect to its predictions on the patterns of divergence and convergence between the nowadays industrialized countries of the OECD. We show that the dispersion of incomes increased after the Industrial Revolution, peaked during the Second World War,...

We assess the effects of changes in household size on the long-run evolution of living standards and on cross-country convergence. When the observed changes in average household size across countries are taken into consideration, growth in living standards is slower throughout the 20th century...

The relationship between female empowerment and economic development is one of the most complex examples of reverse causality, yet multiple scholars acknowledge that female empowerment promotes economic progress. One of the crucial aspects of female empowerment is female entrepreneurship;...