Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic...

We study the effect of capital controls on the level of investment in human capital and the resulting growth path of an economy. The economy consists of two groups of agents based on the ownership of factors of production. One type of agents – called workers – own human capital and bequeath...

We construct an overlapping generations model to study the effect of capital controls on human capital investments and the incidence of redistributive politics in a growing economy. We argue that the conventional wisdom linking higher capital controls to lower growth is reproduced only when an...

The empirical literature finds mixed evidence on the existence of positive productivity externalities in the host country generated by foreign multinational companies. We propose a mechanism that emphasizes the role of local financial markets in enabling foreign direct investment (FDI) to...

We revisit the idea that colonized countries that were more (less) economically advanced in 1500 became poorer (richer, respectively) by the late 20th century. Using data on place of origin of today's country populations and the urbanization and population density measures used by Acemoglu et...

Over the past decade, research explaining cross country income differences has increasingly pointed to the dominant role of total factor productivity (TFP) gaps as opposed to factor accumulation. Nevertheless, it is a widely held belief that a country's ability to absorb and implement...

This paper argues that a significant part of measured TFP differences across countries is attributable not to technological factors that affect the entire economy neutrally, but rather, to variations in the structural composition of economies. In particular, the allocation of scarce inputs...