This article investigates economic performance when enforceable propertyrights are missing and basic needs matter for consumption. It suggests anew view of the so-called voracity eect according to which windfall gains inproductivity induce behavior that leads to lower economic growth. Takinginto...

In an inuential article Tornell and Lane (1999) considered an economy populatedby multiple powerful groups in which property rights in the formal sectorof production are not protected. They obtained conditions under which thegroups appropriate output from the formal sector in order to invest it...

The output multiplier turns negative before a deficit spending program expires.We show the generality of this unpleasant finding for the standard real business cyclemodel. We then calibrate an extended model for the US and demonstrate how fiscalstimulus slows down economic recovery from...

Unied growth theory predicts that the timing of the fertility transitionis a key determinant of contemporary comparative development, as itmarks the onset of the take-o to sustained growth. Neoclassical growth theorypresupposes a take-o, and explains comparative development by variationsin...

This paper proposes a theory for the gradual evolution of knowl-edge diffusion and growth over the very long run. A feedback mechanismbetween capital accumulation and the ease of knowledge diffusion explains along epoch of (quasi-) stasis and an epoch of high growth linked by a grad-ual economic...

Conventional R&D-based growth theory suggests that productivitygrowth is positively correlated with population size or population growth,an implication which is hard to see in the data. Here we integrate R&D-basedgrowth into a unied growth setup with micro-founded fertility and...

We examine the long-run relationship between fertility, mortality, and incomeusing panel cointegration techniques and the available data for the last century.Our main result is that mortality changes and growth of income per capita account for amajor part of the fertility change characterizing...

We set up a neoclassical growth model extended by a corporate sector, aninvestment and finance decision of firms, and a set of taxes on capital income. We provideanalytical dynamic scoring of taxes on corporate income, dividends, capital gains, otherprivate capital income, and depreciation...

This paper introduces the Small World model (Watts and Strogatz, Nature,1998) into the theory of economic growth and investigates how increasing economic integrationaects rm size and effciency, norm enforcement, and aggregate economic performance.When economic integration is low and local...