Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...

This paper deals with the influence of cultural attitudes towards uncertainty on the level of businessownership across countries. First, the concepts of uncertainty and risk are elaborated, as well as theirrelevance for entrepreneurship. Second, cross-sectional regression analysis using data for...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the impact of inequality on economic growth. Both theoretical and empirical approaches have produced ambiguous results on sign and size of this relationship. Although there is a considerable part of the literature that considers inequality...

This paper studies the relationship between the change in the unemployment rate and output growth using an approach based on labor market flows. The framework shows why the Okun coefficient may be constant/time-varying and/or symmetric/asymmetric and that the outcome lies with the behavior of...

This paper explores the link between trade structure, trade specialization and per capita incomegrowth. It is argued that industrial upgrading in export specialization patterns has a positive long-rungrowth effect, while the effect of structural change in industrial import patterns is in...

Over a five-year period in the 1990s Vietnam experienced annual economic growth of more than 8% and a decrease of 15 points in the proportion of children chronically malnourished (stunted). We estimate the extent to which changes in the distribution of child nutritional status can be explained...

A recently much debated issue is why observed investment and growth rates inpoor countries are lower than traditional theory predicts. Empirical evidencesuggests that social and political instability is a major reason for thedivergence between poor and rich countries. However, there is still the...