We propose and test empirically a theory describing the endogenous formation and persistence of mega-states, using China as an example. We suggest that the relative timing of the emergence of agricultural societies, and their distance from each other, set off a race between their autochthonous...

Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich...

Public support of research typically relies on the notion that universities are engines of economic development, and that university research is a primary driver of high wage localized economic activity. Yet the evidence supporting that notion is based on aggregate descriptive data, rather than...

On 1 January 1999, four major reforms took effect in Poland in the areas of health, education, pensions and local administration. After 20 years, only in the last case does the original structural design remain essentially unchanged. We examine the implications of this reform from the...

High growth firms (HGFs) are important for job creation and considered to be precursors of economic growth. We investigate how product- and labor-market regulations, as well as the quality of regional governments that implement these regulations, affect HGF development across European regions....

This paper provides an overview of the state of the art of the intersection of development economics and entrepreneurship. Given the relative neglect of entrepreneurship by development scholars it deals with (i) recent theoretical insights from the intersection of entrepreneurship and...

We discuss the two-way link between culture and economic growth. We present a model of endogenous technical change where growth is driven by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is risky and requires investments that affect the steepness of the lifetime consumption profile....