This paper introduces the Small World model (Watts and Strogatz, Nature, 1998) into the theory of economic growth and investigates how increasing economic integration affects firm size and efficiency, norm enforcement, and aggregate economic performance. When economic integration is low and...

Unied growth theory predicts that the timing of the fertility transitionis a key determinant of contemporary comparative development, as itmarks the onset of the take-o to sustained growth. Neoclassical growth theorypresupposes a take-o, and explains comparative development by variationsin...

Conventional R&D-based growth theory suggests that productivitygrowth is positively correlated with population size or population growth,an implication which is hard to see in the data. Here we integrate R&D-basedgrowth into a unied growth setup with micro-founded fertility and...

This article investigates economic performance when enforceable property rights are missing and subsistence needs matter. It shows that if per capita income is sufficiently high, a windfall gain in productivity triggers behavior that leads to higher growth (the normal reaction). The same shock...

This paper proposes a model that links households and firms, as usual, by markets for factors and goods and, additionally, by a banking sector that channels households' funds to firms and eliminates idiosyncratic risk. In equilibrium, agency costs and tax benefits of corporate debt are...