We construct an endogenous growth model that includes a cultural variable along the dimension of individualism-collectivism. The model predicts that more individualism leads to more innovation because of the social rewards associated with innovation in an individualist culture. This cultural...

The World Bank is uniquely positioned to identify and disseminate innovative development practices. Based on his thirty-year experience as a World Bank staff member, the author takes an institutional perspective on the innovation climate at the World Bank focusing on dominant development...

Using newly collected national and sub-national data and historical case studies, this paper argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present income differences, and, in...

This essay reviews the historical and ongoing role played by trade in sustained high growth and human development progress, and makes the case that the post-2015 development agenda should include considerations related to trade rules and supply-side capacity. Given the strong links between...

In this paper, we try to understand whether measures of GDP per capita taken from the national accounts or measures of mean income or consumption derived from household surveys better proxy for true income per capita. We propose a data-driven method to assess the relative quality of GDP per...

We revisit the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditures. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of people...

We examine how entrepreneurship and institutional and policy reforms affect development (proxied by the rate of growth in per–capita income). We do so by performing Arellano-Bond GMM estimations on annual data for a large group of developing and developed countries, and covering the period...

This paper develops a framework which analyzes how a population's culture affects the decisions of rational profit maximizing firms, while simultaneously exploring how the actions of these firms in turn affect the population's culture.By endogenizing culture as well as the more usual economic...

This essay reviews the historical and ongoing role played by trade in sustained high growth and human development progress, and makes the case that the post-2015 development agenda should include considerations related to trade rules and supply-side capacity. Given the strong links between...

The majority of microfinance impact studies focus on finding their effect on a specific group of beneficiaries, in contrast we aim to identify the impact on whole economies (economic growth, and financial sector development and reductions in income inequalities), which is an important policy...