After a decade of research, the effect of inequality on long-run economic growth remains unresolved, in part because researchers have treated omitted variable bias as an estimation problem rather than a deeper question of causality. In this article we argue that the key omitted variable is the...

We consider the role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in a Schumpeterian growth model in which patent holders face the threats of profit loss due to imitation and complete replacement due to successful outside innovation. In this setting stronger IPR enforcement has both imitation and...

We estimate a finite mixture model in which countries are sorted into groups based on the similarity of the conditional distributions of their growth rates. We strongly reject the hypothesis that all countries follow a common growth process in favor of a model in which there are four classes of...