We provide a theory of the interaction between intergenerational living arrangements and economic development. We show that, when technical progress is fast enough, the economy experiences a shift from stagnation to growth, there is a transition from coresidence to non-coresidence, and the...

The theory of welfare accounting shows that comprehensive measures of net investment can be used to test whether an economy is following unsustainable paths of consumption. However, the notion of net investment used in most applied studies rules out technological progress and terms-of-trade...

Although Unified Growth Theory presumes the existence of the Maltusian mechanism in pre-industrial England recent empirical studies challenged this assumption. This paper studies the interaction of vital rates and real wages in the period from 1540 to 1870 in England. We employ time-varying...

The paper analyses a two-sector model of endogenous growth with two common features of economic development: stages of sustained growth and underdevelopment traps. The model also demonstrates the transitional issues of a temporary underdevelopment trap, seemingly sustainable growth, and a...

This paper explores the implications of Unified Growth Theory for the origins of existing differences in income per capita across countries. The theory sheds light on three fundamental layers of comparative development. It identifies the factors that have governed the pace of the transition from...

The ghost of a long-dead growth model still haunts aid to developing countries. The Harrod-Domar growth model supposedly died long ago. But for more than 40 years, economists working on developing countries have applied- still apply- Harrod-Domar model to calculate short-run investment...

In this paper, we test whether the growth experience of a sample of OECD countries over the past three decades is more consistent with the human-capital augmented Solow model of exogenous growth, or with an endogenous growth model à la Uzawa-Lucas with constant returns to scale to broad (human...

In developing countries, income per capita typically remains stagnant for long periods before taking-off. We study this as the outcome of a gradual transition of the workforce from traditional to modern sectors. While exogenous productivity growth is present in the modern sector only, transition...

We introduce endogenous time preference via investment in patience (farsightedness) in an overlapping generations growth model to study development traps. There is no investment in patience, if the economy is very poor, while if it is wealthy enough there is always such investment. We explore...

We develop a parsimonious finance and endogenous growth model with microeconomic frictions in entrepreneurship and a role for credit constraints. We demonstrate that though an efficiency-growth relation will always exist, the efficiency-depth-growth relation may not. This has implications for...