In this paper we study Malthusian pressures in a frontier economy. Using the empirical data on the real prices and demographic variables from 1688 to 1860 for Quebec and Montreal, we test for the existence of Malthusian pressures. Bearing in mind the particularities of frontier economies and the...

Does a countrys level of inequality affect its ability to win Olympic medals? If it does, is it conditional on institutional factors? We argue that the ability of economically free societies to win medals will not be affected by inequality. In these societies, institutions generate incentives to...

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life," such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can be calculated with manageable data requirements....

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;...

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...

We propose theory-based Monte Carlo simulations to quantify the extent to which the estimated speed of convergence depends on the underlying econometric techniques. Based on a theoretical growth model as the data generating process, we find that, given a true speed of convergence of around 5%,...