Extreme events are one of the main channels through which climate and socio- economic systems interact. It is likely that climate change will modify their probability distributions and their consequences. The long-term growth models used in climate change assessments, however, cannot capture the...

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of life expectancy on economic growth by explicitly accounting for the role of the demographic transition. In addition to focusing on issues of empirical identification, this paper emphasizes the role of the econometric specification. We present a...

We express the idea of classical competition in a statistical equilibrium model, where the tendency for competition to equalize profit rates results in an exponential power (or Subbotin) distribution. The model supports and extends recent evidence on the Laplace distribution of growth rates in...

A recent literature has emerged providing compelling evidence that a major shift in the organization of the developed economies has been taking place: away from what has been characterized as the managed economy towards the entrepreneurial economy. In particular, the empirical evidence provides...

This paper performs an empirical analysis of the international cross sectional distribution of gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates and business cycles. We consider a balanced panel of 91 countries in the period 1960-2010 and two different measures of GDP fluctuations: the logarithmic...

The Doha Development Round or Doha Development Agenda (DDA) is the current trade-negotiation round of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which launched in November 2001. With the start of this round, non-trade concerns (NTCs) were explicitly renowned and integrated into the negotiation process....

The recent literature on convergence has departed from the earlier literature by focusing on the shape of the production function and the rate at which an economy converges to its own steady state. This paper uses advances from the recent literature to look back at the question that originally...

Unit roots in output, an exponential 2% rate of convergence and no change in the underlying dynamics of output seem to be three stylized facts that cannot go together. This paper extends the Solow-Swan growth model allowing for cross-sectional heterogeneity. In this framework, aggregate shocks...

When financial regulators require banks to hold a higher ratio of equity capital to debt funding, banks incur short-term costs as they adjust their balance sheets and lose some of the advantages associated with their existing funding mix. They then seek to maintain post-tax income by, for...