Evidence from a current panel of harmonized worldwide data highlights a robust negative effect of income inequality on economic growth that we trace back to its transmission channels. Less equal societies tend to have less educated populations and higher fertility rates, but not necessarily...

This paper investigates the causes of the "vanishing effect of finance" detected in recent studies. The results highlight that the negative effect of the financial system on growth is mainly driven by advanced economies, whereas finance is still beneficial for income increases in developing...

We present a new aggregation method - called SVM algorithm - and use this technique to produce novel measures of democracy (186 countries, 1960-2014). The method takes its name from a machine learning technique for pattern recognition and has three notable features: it makes functional...

Does the financial sector contribute to economic growth? While most of the studies carried out before the Financial crisis tend to answer the question with “yes”, recent empirical work provides evidence that the opposite is true. We study these new findings in detail, applying GMM and 3SLS...

Germany has experienced tremendous growth rates in the aftermath of World War II. Since the early 1970s, growth rates declined and settled down at a more or less constant rate of 2 percent per year, only to experience a renewed negative trend around the early 2000s. We investigate the evolution...

We study the effect of entrepreneurship on economic growth. First, we illustrate that entrepreneurship affects the investment decision in horizontal and vertical innovations within endogenous growth models. As a direct consequence, the level of entrepreneurship exerts significant growth stimuli....

Evidence from a novel measure of democracy (SVMDI) based on Support Vector Machines highlights a robust positive relationship between democracy and economic growth. We argue that the ambiguity in recent studies can be traced back to the neglect of the information in the equation in levels and...