In West Germany workers with similar skills earn different wages according to the industry in which they are employed. This finding is no surprise given the institutional rigidities of the West German labor market. But the similarity of the interindustry wage structures in West Germany and in...

Will a country embedded in an integrated world economy be able to completely insulate its economy from foreign economic disturbances by letting its currency float freely in the foreign exchange market? Both theoretical considerations and the actual experience after the movement to flexible...

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...