This paper provides estimates of the economic impact of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in China and India for the period 2012-2030. Our estimates are derived using WHO's EPIC model of economic growth, which focuses on the negative effects of NCDs on labor supply and capital accumulation. We...

This paper investigates the effects of financial development and political instability on economic growth in a power-ARCH framework with data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. Our findings suggest that (i) informal or unanticipated political instability (e.g., guerrilla warfare) has a direct...

What is the relationship between economic growth and its volatility? Does political instability affect growth directly or indirectly, through volatility? This paper tries to answer such questions using a power-ARCH framework with annual time series data for Argentina from 1896 to 2000. We show...

Argentina is the only country in the world that was "developed" in 1900 and "developing" in 2000. The various competing explanations highlight, mainly, the roles of trade openness, political institutions, financial integration, financial development, and macroeconomic instability. Yet no study...

Satiation of need is generally ignored by growth theory. I study a model where consumers may be satiated in any given good but new goods may be introduced. A social planner will never elect a trajectory with long-run satiation. Instead, he will introduce enough new goods to avoid such a...

We develop a span-of-control model where managerial skills are endogenous and the outcome of investments over the life cycle of managers. We calibrate this model to U.S plant-size data to quantify the effects of distortions that are correlated with the size of production units. These distortions...

Despite ubiquitous discussions of robots' potential impact, there is almost no systematic empirical evidence on their economic effects. In this paper we analyze for the first time the economic impact of industrial robots, using new data on a panel of industries in 17 countries from 1993-2007.We...

Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders' quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for contesting elections, making it critical to...

This paper constructs a two-period overlapping generations model of human capital investment decisions where a microloan program designed to finance entrepreneurial activities is active. It is shown that, in the presence of human capital externalities (social returns to education) there exists a...

Limited human capital investment is a common characteristic of low-income countries despite the fact that estimated returns to educational investment in low-income countries are generally higher than in high-income countries. Empirical evidence suggests that income and credit constraints can...