This paper takes a step towards formalizing the theoretical interconnections among four post-Industrial Revolution phenomena - the industrialization and growth take-off of rich 'northern' nations, massive global income divergence, and rapid trade expansion. Specifically, we present a stages-of...

Investment in human capital is a central issue in the literature on economic growth. The purpose of this study is to shed light on the economic incentives for investment in university education across countries. An empirical investigation of earnings for private-sector engineers and business...

This thesis contains two studies. The first study investigates the income distribution among Namibian households. The second study examines the differences in earnings between males and females in the Namibian labour market. In both studies we use the 1993/1994 Namibia Household Income and...

Sweden experienced exeptionally fast economic growth during the century-long period 1870-1970. This illustrates that a decentralized market economy, highly open to international transactions, may be quite conductive to sustained productivity growth if the government fulfills its 'classical'...

In this paper it is argued that the size distribution of firms may largely be determined by institutional factors. This hypothesis is tested in an exploratory fashion by studying the evolution of the size distribution of firms over time in Sweden for a period spanning from the late 1960s to the...

This paper analyses the effect on agglomeration tendencies of allowing firms to become multi-region firms in a standard model of trade and location. More specifically, we introduce horizontal and vertical multi-region firms into the core-periphery (CP) model developed by Krugman (1991). The...

This paper considers the possibility of letting a pay-go pension system mimic a fully funded pension system. Generically, it turns out to be impossible to make a less than fully funded pension system actuarially fair on average. But a non-funded pay-go pension system can provide an actuarially...

In the models of Young (1993a,b), boundedly rational individuals are recurrently matched to play a game, and they play myopic best replies to the recent history of play. It could therefore be an advantage to instead play a myopic best reply to the myopic best reply, something boundedly rational...

This paper presents a model of R&D-driven growth without scale effects where firms can engage in both horizontal and vertical R&D activities. Unlike in earlier models of R&D-driven growth without scale effects by Jones (1995), Segerstrom (1998) and Young (1998), R&D subsidies can have long-run...

A number of cross-country comparisons do not find a robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. In part this may reflect the prediction in economic theory that a negative relationship should exist primarily for rich countries with large public sectors. In this paper...