We offer theory and evidence that supports the view that systemic financial crises impact income inequality negatively in richer countries, where institutions, such as social safety nets, work better than in developing countries. More generally, to our knowledge, our work is the first to provide...

While poorer countries have a much smaller public sector and correspondingly a smaller tax burden than richer countries, their economic performance has not been necessarily better. This paper discusses the role that institutional quality plays in determining government’s effectiveness in...

There is growing interest in using messaging to drive prosocial behaviors, which contribute to investment in public goods. The authors worked with a leading nongovernmental organization in Peru to randomize nine different prorecycling messages that were crafted on the basis of best practices,...

Evidence from historical and epidemiological literatures show that epidemics tend to spread in the population according to a logistic pattern. We conjecture that the impact of new technologies on output follows a pattern of spread not unlike that of typical epidemics. After reaching a critical...

This paper extends Grossman and Helpman’s seminal work (1991), and presents an endogenous growth model where innovations created in a high-tech sector may be assimilated or adapted by a low-tech sector. Applying a simple Heckscher-Ohlin framework, the effects of technological diffusion are...