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...