We compare changes in schooling output and in schooling input of six East Asian countries to derive a measure of productivity change. Our results question the impression that all is well with education in East Asia. First, we find that the cognitive achievement of pupils did not change...

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 estimate the relative roles of factor inputs and productivity in explaining the level of economic development, which is measured as output per worker. For a large sample of countries, we show that alternative identifying productivity assumptions and alternative measures of human capital have...

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...

Recent time series studies reject the hypothesis of catching up in terms of international per capita incomes as derived from the traditional neoclassical growth model. In turn, they seem to support new theories of economic growth which are capable of explaining persistent international...

Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the...

I reconsider the primacy of institutions over geography as an explanatory factor of cross-country differences in economic performance, which has recently been postulated by Acemoglu et al. (2001) and others. My estimates show that the reported missing direct performance effects of a measure of...

Einfache Lehrbuchmodelle liefern widersprüchliche Aussagen zu den Wirkungen eines arbeitssparenden technischen Fortschritts auf die Löhne. Ein Modell der offenen Volkswirtschaft mit zwei Diversifizierungskegeln zeigt verschiedene Möglichkeiten auf, wie der arbeitssparende technische...

Countries with the highest labor productivity overwhelmingly lie in the world's temperate climatic zones far away from the equator. The question we address is whether climatic conditions as measured by distance from the equator remain correlated with labor productivity after other variables are...

Translated to a cross-country context, the Solow model (Solow, 1956) predicts that international differences in steady state output per person are due to international differences in technology for a constant capital output ratio. However, most of the cross-country growth literature that refers...