This paper explores the implications of Unified Growth Theory for the origins of existing differences in income per capita across countries. The theory sheds light on three fundamental layers of comparative development. It identifies the factors that have governed the pace of the transition from...

This Paper studies the effect of knowledge diffusion on the incentives for developed countries’ (DC) firms to undertake costly transfer of production knowledge of an input to their developing countries’ (LDC) suppliers whose costs of production vary inversely with their technological effort....

This paper models technology adoption as replacing workers by machines, which perform the same job in the production process. The paper shows that such modelling of technology adoption affects significantly the analysis of economic growth. This model can explain large and persistent...

This Paper examines the impact of imported technologies on productivity for a sample of developing and transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Southern Mediterranean. These economies are getting more and more integrated to the European Union. The Paper departs from earlier...

This paper considers an economy where skilled and unskilled workers use different technologies. The rate of improvement of each technology is determined by a profit-maximizing R&D sector. When there is a high proportion of skilled workers in the labour-force, the market for skill-complementary...

This Paper examines the process of development from an epoch of Malthusian stagnation to a state of sustained economic growth. The analysis focuses on recently advanced unified growth theories that capture the intricate evolution of income per capita, technology, and population over the course...

We estimate the effect of the diffusion of photovoltaic (PV) systems on the fraction of votes obtained by the German Green Party. The logistic diffusion of PV systems offers a new identification strategy. We take first differences and instrument adoption rates (i.e. the first difference in the...

We study the lags with which new technologies are adopted across countries, and their long-run penetration rates once they are adopted. Using data from the last two centuries, we document two new facts: there has been convergence in adoption lags between rich and poor countries, while there has...