We investigate the impact of institutions on entrepreneurial entry, based on a large cross-country sample, combining working age population data generated by the GEM project with macro level indicators. Our four key findings indicate that: (a) institutional obstacles to entrepreneurship have...

Attendance in education and associated years of schooling have expanded substantially in developing countries in recent years. But has this expansion in enrolments reduced existing inequalities in educational access and achievements? This paper analyzes differences in improvements in the access...

This paper describes recent trends in productivity growth in the EU and the US. By adopting a sectoral perspective, we achieve a deeper understanding of the compositional patterns of aggregate growth and shed light on the reasons why the EU productivity has lagged behind the US during the period...

Recent studies in economic development seek to establish that institutional quality is an important determinant of long-run living standards. Moreover, it appears that property rights institutions are causal for development whereas contracting institutions affect the nature of financial...

Innovation is often seen as carried out by highly educated labour in R&D intensive companies with strong ties to leading centers of excellence in the scientific world. Seen from this angle innovation is a typical "first world" activity. There is, however, another way to look at innovation that...

Political economics predicts that the rich oppose redistribution and vote for conservative parties. Although this seemingly fits the data well in most countries, I show that the relationship breaks down when we control for unobservable characteristics. Using Norwegian survey data, I study to...

In this paper we argue that the main determinant of differences in prosperity across countries are differences in economic institutions. To solve the problem of development will entail reforming these institutions. Unfortunately, this is difficult because economic institutions are collective...

This paper investigates the determinants of specialisation in 7 European countries and 4 major industrial sectors in the last 20 years. Next to the impact of traditional factors such as productivity and the endowment of labour and capital, we look at the importance of accounting for capital...

When designing a national public procurement system, the degree of centralization (or, equivalently, the degree of demand aggregation) is one of the most crucial as well as puzzling policy choices. Centralized procurement has been traditionally considered as an instrument to reduce public...