The transition from a hunter-gather economy to agricultural production, which made possible the endogenous technological progress that ultimately led to the industrial revolution, is one of the most important events in the thousands of years of humankind’s economic development. In this paper...

We present a model of vine-growing specialization in the municipalities of the province of Barcelona in the mid-19th century that explains how a comparative advantage arose through a process deemed to be one of the starting points for Catalan industrialization. The results confirm the roles...

We present a statistical model of agrarian vineyard specialization in the province of Barcelona towards 1860, that combines the Boserupian push of population increase, the demand pull of a Smithian-type of growth (measured by the time-distances to the nearest seaport), and the agrological lands...

We use a set of landscape metrics to study the long-term environmental transformation of a typical coastal Mediterranean area from 1850 to 2005. Our figures show a dramatic environmental deterioration between 1950 and 2005. The main proximate drivers of this landscape degradation are the effects...

This paper presents empirical evidence that the neoclassical explanation of real wage has a high explanatory power at macro level. The factor endowments explanation of wage is surprisingly rare in the literature, at least at empirical level. In this paper, using panel data from 26 OECD...

Product selection matters for a firm’s productivity and long-run growth. Recent theoretical and empirical studies indicate that an important margin of adjustment to policy reforms is the reallocation of output within firms through changes in product mix decisions. This paper examines the...

Most studies analysing the infrastructure impact on regional growth show a positive relationship between both variables. However, the public capital elasticity estimated in a Cobb-Douglas function, which is the most common specification in these works, is sometimes too big to be credible, so...

Mankiw Romer and Weil (1992) made the Solovian set up widely-used to test the determinants of economic growth and the speed of convergence. Subsequently, in almost all convergence studies, an exogenously growing technology is assumed and this component is treated as part of the constant term. In...

Defense literature is still in need of a theoretical framework in the neoclassical sense, in regard to empirical research on the relationship between defense spending and economic growth. In this respect, Dunne, Smith and Willenbockel (2005), although not without technical problems, represented...

This work studies the role of gender on economic convergence in a standard convergence model expanded by gender shares of labor force. The theoretical part of the paper shows the positive role of gender on economic growth. Next, the paper presents 5-year span panel data tests of the contribution...