Is human capital a robust predictor of good institutions? Using a new institutional quality measure, the International Property Rights Index (IPRI), we find that cognitive skill measures are significant, robust, and large in magnitude. We use two databases of cognitive skills: estimates of...

Because the Federal Reserve is constantly responding to developments in the economy, it has been difficult to come up with convincing estimates of the effects of exogenous shifts in money supply on interest rates. This study uses exogenous, well-identified reserve supply shocks to estimate how...

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...

Many studies have looked at how individual player traits influence individual choice in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma, but few studies have looked at how the average traits of pairs of players influence the average choices of pairs. We consider cognitive ability, patience, risk tolerance,...

Do national differences in cognitive skills (CS) predict a nation’s likelihood of generating high-quality entrepreneurs who create and expand high-value businesses? We answer this question by estimating cross-country regressions that use the Acs and Szerb Global Entrepreneurship Development...

But this O-ring sector, with its increasing returns and strategic complementarities, inherently creates opportunities for slightly-less-skilled workers in any other sector that exhibits diminishing returns--if the O-ring sectors are like "rungs on a ladder," then diminishing returns sectors can...

Cognitive skills are robustly associated with good national economic performance. How much of this is due to high-skill countries doing a better job of absorbing total factor productivity from the world's technology leader? Following Benhabib and Spiegel (Handbook of Economic Growth, 2005), who...

Are more intelligent groups better at cooperating? A meta-study of repeated prisoner's dilemma experiments run at numerous universities suggests that students cooperate 5-8% more often for every 100-point increase in the school's average SAT score. This result survives a variety of robustness...

I show that in a conventional Ramsey model, between one-fourth and one-half of the global income distribution can be explained by a single factor: The effect of large, persistent differences in national average IQ on the private marginal product of labor. Thus, differences in national average IQ...