This article considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from being a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process, most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system, as measured by the...

Human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities. However, the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive. The missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return, by...

Religiosity is defined as the importance of religion in all aspects of life. The definition is operationalized into a robust measure by aggregating 14 items from the World Values Surveys. Religiosity falls by 50 % when countries pass through the transition from being underdeveloped to becoming...

A simple general equilibrium model is borrowed from economics to study alternative foreign policy strategies of regional powers that are conditional on external constraints. An equilibrium hegemonic strategy is modeled as the joint production and consumption of two “goods” (empire and...

We show that the specification of technology differences in recent empirical studies of trade is not supported by basic growth theory and may lead to biased estimates of the pattern of specialization and trade.