The author surveys recent growth models that try to explain the diversity among countries in rates of economic growth. The author finds that these models can generate differences in growth rates only in the absence of international capital markets. Under these models, if there were free...

The authors suggest that there are important opportunities to empirically evaluate the theoretically predicted channels from policy to growth. They propose a research agenda based on the endogenous growth literature, designed to address the questions: How do national policies affect long-run...

One of the central predictions of growth theory, old and new, is that income taxes have a negative effect on the pace of economic expansion. Little empirical work has been done on the topic because of the difficulty of measuring the relevant marginal tax rates. Easterly and Rebelo experiment...

The authors argue that the recent Asian currency crisis was caused by large prospective fiscal deficits associated with implicit bailout guarantees to failing banking systems. They articulate this view using a simple dynamic general equilibrium model, whose key feature is that a speculative...