The paper considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system. This is shown by using the...

Measures of corruption and income are highly correlated across countries. We use prehistoric measures of biogeography as instruments for modern income levels to identify an exogenous long-run income effect. We find that our corruption-free incomes explain the cross-country pattern of corruption...

Acemoglu, Johnson, Robinson, and Yared (2008) demonstrate that estimation of the standard adjustment model with country-fixed and time-fixed effects removes the statistical significance of income as a causal factor of democracy. We argue that their empirical approach must produce insignificant...

The Grand Transition (GT) view claims that economic development is causal to institutional development, and that many institutional changes can be understood as transitions occurring at roughly the same level (zones) of development. The Primacy of Institutions (PoI) view claims that economic...

The growth rate of total factor productivity seems to have increased recently, at least in the United States. Higher US productivity growth may justify higher stock market valuations than in the past and thus herald an emerging New Economy. However, the size of the estimated growth rate of total...

We reconsider the effects of long-run economic growth on relative factor prices across cones of specialization. We model economic growth as exogenous technical change. Allowing for capital biased technical change with a sector bias and for endogenous commodity prices, we find that economic...

Factor endowments are usually taken as given in trade theoretical analyses of technological change. We use the Deardorff (1974) diagram to show how the steady state capital labor ratio endogenously adjusts to technology shocks in a two-sector small open economy, an effect which has largely been...

We combine the augmented Solow model with the Mincer equation to derive a specification that identifies an education externality within a production function framework. The previous empirical literature has not reached a consensus about the size of the education externality, which is given by...

Based on Baumol's cost-disease model, we develop two alternative measures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Both productivity measures are based on changes in the relative price of schooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schooling has increased faster in 1970-94...

We consider the empirical relevance of two opposing hypotheses on the causality between income and democracy: The Democratic Transition claims that rising incomes cause a transi¬tion to democracy, whereas the Critical Junctures hypothesis denies this causal relation. Our empirical strategy is...