We introduce a new database of historical Genuine Savings (GS), an indicator of sustainable development promoted by the World Bank and widely used in contemporary economic research. GS derives from the theoretical work on wealth accounting, and addresses shortcomings in conventional metrics of...

Building on recent advances in the literature on knowledge creation and innovation (notably Carnehl and Schneider (2025), we propose a novel general equilibrium model that explicitly incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) as a decision-enhancing technology capable of interpolating between...

How do advanced technology adoption and venture capital (VC) funding impact employment and growth? An analysis of data from the US Census Bureau suggests that while both advanced technology use and VC funding matter on their own for firm outcomes, their joint presence is most strongly correlated...

Cities are often described as engines of economic growth. We assess this statement quantitatively. We focus on two mechanisms: a static agglomeration effect that makes production in bigger cities more efficient, and a dynamic effect whereby urban scale impacts the productivity of invention,...

What sparked humanity's leap from stagnation to prosperity? What lies at the core of inequality among nations? Unified Growth Theory explores the evolution of societies over the entire course of human history. It uncovers the universal wheels of change that have governed the journey of humanity,...

This paper studies China's four-fold increase in per capita GDP relative to the U.S. between 1995 and 2019. First, we argue that China's growth pattern is very similar to that of several other East Asia economies that initially grew very quickly. Second, we show that a minimalist...

We quantify the contribution of the largest firms to South Korea's economic performance over the period 1972-2011. Using firm-level historical data, we document a novel fact: firm concentration rose substantially during the growth miracle period. To understand whether rising concentration...

Compared to a half-century ago, inequality in the United states has risen and measured productivity growth has fallen. Concerns about rising inequality have been exacerbated by the observation that prices of goods consumed by the poor have risen faster than prices of goods consumed by the rich....

Capitalism since its inception has been marked by large fluctuations. The resulting episodic unemployment has been very costly. This paper provides an overview of alternative theories. Standard models (such as DSGE) have not provided insights into the causes of the fluctuations and the shocks...

We study the dynamic properties of the wealth distribution in an overlapping generations model with warm-glow bequests and heterogeneous attitudes towards risk. Some dynasties of agents are risk averters, and others are risk lovers. Agents can invest in two types of Lucas trees. The two types of...