This essay provides a review of two important recent books on economic growth: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin and Slouching Towards Utopia, by J. Bradford DeLong. Each book is noteworthy for its erudition and breadth. I explore strengths and weaknesses of these books...

This paper develops some general conditions under which complementarities between individual agents imply that assortative matching is efficient. Our analysis has four main findings. First, when agents are organized into equal-sized groups, just as in Becker (1973), the presence of within-group...

This paper considers the observational implications of social influences on adoption decisions for an environment of perfect foresight adopters. We argue that social influences can produce two observable effects: 1) discontinuities in unconditional adoption curves and 2) pattern reversals in...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of identification in linear social interactions models. This is both a theoretical and an econometric exercise as the analysis is linked to a rigorously delineated model of interdependent decisions. We develop an incomplete information game that...

This paper considers the question of how one can translate evidence of nonlinearities and threshold effects in growth into policy recommendations. We argue that the current evidence of these effects, while important in terms of scholarly debates, does not readily lend itself to policy...

This two-volume original reference work provides a comprehensive overview of development economics and comprises contributions by some of the leading scholars working in the field. Authors are drawn from around the world and write on a wide range of topics.

We provide an overview of recent empirical research on patterns of cross-country growth. The new empirical regularities considered differ from earlier ones, e.g., the well-known Kaldor stylized facts. The new research no longer makes production function accounting a central part of the analysis....

This paper presents a framework for understanding the limits that exist in optimal policy design in dynamic contexts. We consider the design of policies in the context of dynamic linear models. Fundamental design limits exist for policy rules in such environments in the sense that any policy...

This paper surveys research on social capital. We explore the concepts that motivate the social capital literature, efforts to formally model social capital using economic theory, the econometrics of social capital, and empirical studies of the role of social capital in various socioeconomic...